Margins are tightening. Regulatory scrutiny is rising. And across bulk shipping, Cargo Owners are starting to scrutinise something they once took for granted: their own internal workflows.

For years, commercial planning, voyage execution, and claims handling lived in separate silos: often handled manually through a tangle of Excel files, email threads, PDFs, and ERP modules. But when 10–15% of your freight budget is being siphoned off to demurrage, those inefficiencies become strategic.

We recently invested in Voyager, a US-headquartered startup rebuilding how Cargo Owners manage the full life cycle of a voyage. Their edge is precise: workflow automation. 

Our excitement goes beyond the initial wedge - their direction of travel is far bigger. From reactive firefighting to proactive, systemised coordination. This is a new playground for claims teams and a new workflow standard across cargo operations.

The Hidden Drag on Freight Budgets

Today, demurrage eats up between 10–15% of global freight spend. That’s $30 billion per year lost to port delays, manual errors, and missed dispute windows. Most of it stems from fragmented systems and handoffs between departments:

• Ops teams extract timestamps from port agents and manually log them into spreadsheets or Voyage Management Systems.

• Chartering teams rely on those timestamps to calculate laytime, using PDF contracts and Excel templates to work through clauses.

• Finance teams compile claims manually: gathering SOFs, NORs, logs, charterparties, and invoices to submit a dispute.

Each step introduces friction. Each delay shrinks a Cargo Owner’s rights to contest charges.

Voyager’s Wedge: Precision on a Repetitive Pain Point

Voyager starts with a narrow but powerful wedge: demurrage automation.

Their platform combines OCR and AI to extract SOF and NOR data from any document format. A one-click laytime engine then applies all charterparty logic, from proration and parallel ops to grace periods and exceptions, to calculate demurrage with audit trails. Finally, a centralised claim builder unifies documents, statuses, and email threads in one place.

The result:

• 80% less time spent assembling a claim;

• 15–20% cost savings on demurrage;

• And in many cases, $100K+ saved annually. Even for smaller Cargo Owners running just 20 voyages a year.

By solving for a cross-functional pain point with high-concurrency and market urgency, Voyager earns both adoption and urgency. It’s no surprise they’ve signed enterprise accounts like Chevron, BASF, Equinor, and OMV, and maintained a strong renewal pipeline off the back of it.

Beyond Demurrage: A Modular Workflow Engine

While demurrage automation is a wedge, Voyager’s vision extends far beyond.

They’re actively stitching together the entire voyage workflow through three expanding modules:

1. Demand Planning
   Built in collaboration with BASF, this tool lets Cargo Owners match trades or cargo positions to available spot, COA, and time charter vessels; solving for pre-voyage planning and procurement.
   
   
   

2. Voyage Management
   Teams can track schedules, voyage PnL, and documentation in real-time, aligning chartering, ops, and finance on a single operational timeline.
   
   
   

3. No-Code Workflow Builder
   This is perhaps the most powerful signal: Cargo Owners can now build and adapt bespoke SOPs (from vessel clearance to freight RFQs) directly into the system. When one customer validates a workflow, Voyager can replicate it across its base. That’s repeatability with compounding value.

Together, this product arc sets Voyager up as the voyage infrastructure layer for Cargo Owners.

Made for Today

Voyager’s timing isn’t accidental. Three macro shifts are accelerating the need for workflow change:

• Margin pressure: With global freight rates’ ever cyclical nature, costs are constantly under stress, where every 1–2% in savings is meaningful. Voyager brings the potential of significant savings on a major line item: demurrage.

• Volatility: Red Sea disruptions and climate-driven canal closures (e.g. Panama anchorage times up to 15 days) are making laytime harder to predict, leading to rising claims. 

Cargo Owners can’t afford to miss billing cycles or manually chase documents. Workflow maturity is now a regulatory, not just operational, issue.

Why We’re Backing Voyager

We saw a CEO, Matt, who knows this problem from the inside: six years in chartering and ops at Stolt gave him a close-up view of voyage management pains. Since we initially met him four years ago, we’ve seen him guiding Voyager through tough product pivots, organisational structuring and customer conversations. Throughout, he’s shown the kind of growth, clarity and adaptability we look for in early-stage leaders.

We’ve also been impressed by the broader team:

• A CTO with enterprise-scale architecture experience;

• A Head of Customer Experience who’s led SaaS rollouts at Exxon and growth-stage companies;

• A GTM lead who understands high-ACV enterprise cycles and knows how to land and expand.

Their focus on a clear ICP and their ability to close and retain enterprise customers (even in volatile cycles) speaks to a sharp GTM motion.

TL;DR

For years, Cargo Owners ran voyages through siloed systems: with Chartering, Ops, and Finance speaking different languages, on different platforms, under tight dispute clocks.

Voyager brings it all together.

Their wedge is demurrage, but their ambition is broader: a unified, repeatable workflow stack that aligns every team involved in a voyage… before, during, and after execution.

Cargo Owners are rebuilding how they work with software and we have invested in a team that understands the complexity from day one.