Windward Brand Guidelines: A 2010 Tel Aviv Start, a London Listing & FTV Capital

Three founders and a ship-data system.

Windward is a maritime data and analytics company that describes itself as a “Maritime AI” business. Hebrew Wikipedia says it was founded in January 2010 by Ami Daniel, who became chief executive, Matan Peled, who later ran its United States operations, and Yonatan Riftin, who has since left the company. The same article places its headquarters in Tel Aviv, with offices in London, the United States, Denmark and the United Arab Emirates. Ami Daniel is still named as co-founder and chief executive on the company’s website.

Hebrew Wikipedia describes the company’s system, called Windward Intelligence, as gathering weather data, daily satellite images of the sea, nautical charts, records of manoeuvres in ports and the ownership of shipping companies and ships, and turning them into information about ship movements for its customers. Among the commercial users it lists are marine insurers, which use risk assessments of each voyage when setting premiums for ships and their cargo; oil companies assessing the risks of moving their cargoes; financial institutions making decisions on deals linked to shipping; and shipping companies assessing risk in their own operations.

Venture investors backed the company through the 2010s. According to Hebrew Wikipedia, the Israeli venture fund Aleph invested in November 2013, in what was the fund’s first investment, and further funding rounds followed in April 2015 and June 2018, the latter including the Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP, first invested in 2016, joined the board in April 2018 and was appointed chairman in October 2019, according to a company announcement issued in Tel Aviv.

A London listing, then a take-private.

In December 2021 Windward’s shares were admitted to trading on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s growth market, Hebrew Wikipedia says; company announcements from the following year carry the ticker WNWD. As a listed company it widened its commercial products. In October 2022 it announced 18 new customers for Ocean Freight Visibility, a recently launched service that predicts estimated times of arrival for vessels and shipments, with users among freight forwarders, cargo owners, shippers and booking platforms in North America, Asia and Europe, according to the company.

It has also worked with other data firms. In October 2020 Windward and Vortexa, the London energy-cargo analytics company, announced a partnership to exchange maritime data, with Windward’s vessel risk assessments feeding into Vortexa’s analytics platform for tanker charterers and shipping companies, their joint announcement said. In July 2025 Windward signed a memorandum of understanding with SGTraDex, Singapore’s trade data exchange, to co-develop tools for trade finance, according to the company.

The listing lasted a little over three years. In December 2024 it was announced that Windward would be acquired by Octopus UK Bidco, a subsidiary of a fund managed by the American growth equity investor FTV Capital, through a merger under Israeli company law that Windward’s independent directors recommended, Hebrew Wikipedia says. The deal closed on 18 March 2025. Windward said the acquisition made it a privately held United States company and that its shares would no longer trade on the London Stock Exchange; three people from FTV Capital joined its board. In the closing announcement Windward described customers among supply chain operators, freight forwarders and energy companies, and FTV Capital said it planned to help build out Windward’s sales organisation, in particular in the United States, and to support product development and international growth.

In February 2026 Windward named Stuart Strachan chairman of the board. He had previously held senior roles at S&P Global and IHS Markit, where he led maritime, trade and supply chain businesses, the company said.

Data, dashboards and route lines.

Maritime data and software firms sell something that is hard to photograph: information about ships, cargoes and markets. So they show the product itself. Their websites lead with screenshots of vessel maps, market dashboards and chartering tools, set out as the companies publish them, and the interface does much of the work that a product photograph would do for a manufacturer. When Kpler redesigned the MarineTraffic web app in 2023, it described the result as a map-centric layout in a subdued grey, with blue kept as an accent for whatever the user has selected.

Numbers carry the second layer of the message. Data-coverage panels list vessels tracked, voyages recorded, AIS signals processed each day or emails read by the platform, and these figures are given by the companies themselves. Signal Ocean’s platform page has a “Signal in numbers” block of this kind, and Kpler’s About page lists the scale of its data sources in the same way.

Trust is shown through customers. Signal Ocean’s site, for example, places a strip of client logos under the line “Trusted by over 200 customers” and pairs it with short pitches written for each type of user: brokers, charterers, owners and operators. Acquisitions arrive as dated press releases, which is why the history of each firm in this series can be traced through its own newsroom as well as through trade titles such as Lloyd’s List, Hellenic Shipping News and The Maritime Executive.

The third element is publishing. Blogs, weekly market monitors, podcasts and research notes on oil, gas, dry bulk and freight sit beside the product pages, so the firms present themselves as market commentators as much as software vendors. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and what it sells, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

Maritime AI as a brand line.

Windward Ltd now presents itself under the trademarked line “Maritime AI,” and its website describes a platform that fuses behavioural analytics with several kinds of sensor data into what it calls a single operational picture. On the commercial side it lists products including Risk & Compliance, Container Tracking and Business Intelligence, and it names commodity trade, marine insurance, maritime law, financial institutions, and shipping, bunkering and marine services among the industries it serves. The website says the company has been building its systems for more than 15 years, and it invites shipowners and maritime operators to send feedback on vessel and ownership details through a dedicated page.

Its data sources have widened beyond ship transponders. In November 2026 Windward acquired Azimut.ai, a maritime visual intelligence company whose cameras, placed at ports and at narrow sea passages, identify and fingerprint vessels in real time, Smart Maritime Network reported. The visual identifications are combined with the AIS, satellite imagery and radio-frequency data already on the platform, and customers receive identification and analytical results rather than raw images or video footage, the report said. Windward said it would seek partnerships with ports and other maritime organisations to host further cameras as part of a growing sensor network.

For a design guide, Windward shows how a data company can build its identity around one short trademarked phrase, “Maritime AI,” repeated across its products and announcements as it moved from Tel Aviv to a London listing and then into private ownership. Compare Kpler, another maritime data company, and Spire Global, a satellite data company. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a slate and an amber accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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