Founders' Spotlight Series
Ceto
The Data Layer That Could Rewrite Maritime Insurance
45% of marine hull-and-machinery claims start with machinery failures no one sees coming. Ceto taps live engine telemetry to turn that blind spot into an underwriting edge.
Maritime quietly moves over 90% of the world’s traded goods. Yet, one of its safety nets, hull-and-machinery (H&M) insurance, still price risk largely from static datasets, costing shipowners roughly US$9.2 billion in premiums every year, with nearly half of all claims stemming from breakdowns deep inside ageing machinery a step change in risk assessment is required.
Those breakdowns are becoming more likely. With the global fleet averaging 22 years old and new carbon-intensity (CII) rules tightening annually, owners face a double bind: mechanical volatility that inflates downtime, and emissions penalties that erode profit. Add fuel prices that swing on geopolitics and you get an industry hunting for data it can trust: data that arrives fast enough to change both a maintenance plan and an insurance quote before the next port call.
That is the window Ceto stepped into.
Breakdown of claims numbers (left) and cost (right) by type of casualty, 2019-2023 (as of June 2024)
The Challenge: The Two-Front Problem
Ageing hardware and carbon scrutiny create intertwined financial risks: unplanned repairs, higher premiums, and CII surcharges. Insurers compensate by padding loss ratios; operators compensate by running slower. Both fixes leave money on the table.
The Founding Story: A Marine Engineer Meets a Coder
Tony Hildrew’s first career saw him taking on marine engineering for North Sea Tankers, rebuilding main engines in the small hours. Ben Harrison cut his teeth building real-time data pipelines for oil-and-gas majors, systems where milliseconds mattered.
A recruitment chat in 2023 turned into nightly calls. Tony vented about engines that “failed in silence”; Ben riffed on anomaly detection at sea. By the seventh call, they had a shared “why now”: sensor prices had plunged, bandwidth had risen, and insurers were starving for live signals.
“I’d spent a decade tearing down engines that never should have failed. We needed to listen to the machinery, instead of patching the problem with more crew,” Tony shared.
Their plan: build a black-box analytics layer that served everyone (crew, owners, insurers), then prove its value on real decks, not slide decks.
Growth and Evolution
Ceto doesn’t just diagnose risk - it now supports the underwriting of it alongside a panel of seven A-rated insurance carriers. Owning both insight and policy keeps incentives aligned: the safer the ship, the stronger everyone’s margin.
WatchKeeper: Black-Box Data With a Crystal Ball | CarbonID: When Compliance Pays Twice |
Mounted like a voyage data recorder, WatchKeeper ingests thousands of sensor points per minute, fuses them with navigation data, and pushes real-time alerts ashore. In a 2024 pilot WatchKeeper flagged multi-variant sensor drift days before a scavenge-space fire would have developed. The crew shut down the main engine and conducted the required maintenance mid-passage; the claim that never happened would have led to days of off-hire, a dent in the company's reputation and six-figure repair costs. | On the bridge, CarbonID turns the same data spine into live CII scoring. One bulk-carrier captain followed CarbonID’s operational prompting and achieved 3% fuel saving across a single voyage leg helping to lift the vessel’s CII grade; the proof-of-performance logs helped negotiate more favourable insurance terms and enhanced charter party agreements. Compliance, in other words, became an EBITDA lever. |
Looking Ahead: What Changes When Data Drives Risk
Ceto’s internal goal of 20% fewer machinery losses industry-wide within the next five years would ripple far beyond one balance sheet. Owners gain uptime, insurers shrink loss ratios, and the planet sees fewer bunker-fueled emergency repairs. If real-time risk pricing becomes table stakes, maritime insurance starts to resemble credit scoring: dynamic, behaviour-based, and crucially, rewarding the operators who run tight ships every single day.
Sometimes the biggest breakthrough is simply seeing the breakdown before it happens and pricing the risk appropriately to reflect actual conditions, instead of working on assumptions.
