ZeroNorth Brand Guidelines: A 2020 Maersk Tankers Spin-Off, Alpha Ori & Propel

A tanker operator’s software, set up as a company.

ZeroNorth is a Copenhagen software company that sells data and planning tools to ship owners, operators, charterers and fuel buyers. It began inside Maersk Tankers, the Danish tanker operator. In June 2020 Offshore Energy reported that a new digital company named ZeroNorth had been established as a spin-off from Maersk Tankers, with the Maersk Tankers chief executive, Christian M. Ingerslev, as its chairman and Søren C. Meyer as its chief executive. The company’s own website gives its founding year as 2020.

Its first product was older than the company. ZeroNorth launched with Optimise, software previously known as SimBunker, which works out a speed for each vessel from market rates, bunker prices, weather and the ship’s own performance data. According to the same 2020 report, Maersk Tankers’ own fleet had used it since June 2019. At launch ZeroNorth had six customers, more than 300 vessels using the software and 38 employees, with backgrounds in mathematical modelling, software engineering, data science, data engineering and shipping, and it planned to grow to as many as 100 people and add more products over time.

Maersk Tankers owned the new business outright at first and said it wanted to bring in strategic investors from the tramp shipping industry, Offshore Energy reported. The launch statement tied the company’s aims to the environment and to earnings at once: it spoke of using digitalisation to cut carbon emissions “to the benefit of the industry as a whole,” and its chief executive described combining “90 years of shipping heritage” with “the expertise of a technology start-up.” The website today sums up the company with the line “engineering the future of sustainable trade.”

Bunkers, Alpha Ori and a wider platform.

ZeroNorth grew largely through acquisitions; its website says it has completed six since it was founded. In late 2022 it bought the bunker platform Prosmar Bunkering, and in February 2023 it acquired the Singapore company BTS and its iBMS (Intelligent Bunker Management System), software for marine fuel suppliers, traders and brokers, Offshore Energy reported. The same report noted that iBMS had been one of the first projects supported by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore’s Maritime Innovation and Technology Fund in the early 2000s, and that ZeroNorth planned to rebuild it as a cloud-based service.

In January 2024 ZeroNorth announced that it would acquire and manage Euronav’s FAST (Fleet Automatic Statistics and Tracking) platform, which collects high-frequency sensor data from ships, with the tanker owner becoming a customer of the wider ZeroNorth platform, according to a company statement published by The Maritime Executive.

A merger followed. ZeroNorth and Alpha Ori Technologies, a Singapore software developer whose high-frequency vessel data and expertise in onboard sensors were folded into the combined business, completed their merger in February 2024 after receiving regulatory approvals, Offshore Energy reported. The merged company kept the ZeroNorth name and its Copenhagen headquarters, with 12 offices worldwide; at that point the two companies together served more than 4,500 vessels and over 200 customers.

Shipping groups also became partners. In July 2025 the commodities trader Trafigura announced a strategic alliance under which it would roll out ZeroNorth’s voyage optimisation, emissions analytics and vessel reporting tools across its controlled fleet of more than 350 vessels, take an equity stake in the company and join its group of strategic partners, Trafigura’s press release from Geneva said.

Not every line has stayed. In September 2026 Ofiniti, a maritime technology company spun out of DNV in 2024, agreed to acquire ZeroNorth’s electronic bunker delivery note (eBDN) application, including BTS, the Singapore entity behind it, Smart Maritime Network reported. ZeroNorth said it would concentrate its bunkering work on procurement, pricing and planning. The sale was agreed in September 2026 and had not been reported as completed at the time of writing.

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.

From Optimise to Propel.

Today ZeroNorth A/S presents one platform divided by task. Its website lists SMARTShip for onboard data acquisition and reporting, Voyage Optimisation for route planning, Bunker Pricer for live fuel price benchmarking and ShipPalm, a maritime ERP for fleet management and operations, alongside tools for choosing vessels, automated noon and arrival reports, emission analytics and bunker procurement. It addresses four audiences by name: vessel owners, commercial operators, charter managers and bunker teams. The company says more than 13,400 vessels have used its platform since 2020 and that around 200 customers use it. Besides the Copenhagen headquarters it lists offices in Athens, Chennai, Mumbai, Tokyo and Singapore. By September 2026 its chief executive was Søren Andersen, Smart Maritime Network reported.

The newest layer is agentic software. In August 2026 the company introduced Propel by ZeroNorth, which it calls “a new agentic AI partner for maritime operations.” At launch Propel offered a voyage optimisation agent that generates a voyage plan, manages communication with the ship’s master and updates the plan with feedback while keeping the operator in the loop; Cargill, Ultrabulk and CMB.TECH were named as early-access partners, according to the company’s statement in The Maritime Executive. The website describes Propel as the company’s next chapter, bringing voyage, vessel and fuel work together, and says new agents will be released over time.

For a design guide, ZeroNorth shows how a spin-off from a shipping operator can present itself as a software brand, with plain product names, navigation organised by audience and a sustainability line set beside commercial language. Compare Veson Nautical, another maritime software company, and Kpler, a maritime data company. For this guide we use a midnight blue, a fjord teal and a coral accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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