The global ferry market

The global ferry market is expanding, as we observed a trend of solutions addressing the customer side of the ferries, water taxis, and cruise domains. The investment opportunities are from locations like Greece and the Nordics - both have a significant local market and local capital funds. In our opinion, the trend demonstrates the readiness of the industry to embrace digital transparency to the end customers, similar to the trends we experienced in different leisure sectors (hotels, flights, etc.)

Interestingly, the trend also corresponds with increasing demand from the industry's traditional operators. During the last 3 years, we observed the challenge of enabling “A-Z digitization” of the customer experience as a whole - from embarkation through disembarkation. Requests for digitization came from passenger terminal operators in the US, EU-based cruise companies, Nordic ferry operators, and more. During the last 12 months we experienced, for the first time, the reflections of those needs from the startups' side, with several solutions that succeeded in gaining traction in a relatively fragmented market. Learning from past consumer sectors such as tourism and shared mobility, there are usually 2-3 platforms that win the global market (such as Booking.com and Waze). Those winners are characterized by first-to-market rather than technology differentiation. Consequently, we are screening the solutions and the founders and will keep scouting for possible future winners.