Ship managers today are being squeezed from both sides: owners are constantly pressuring them to cut operating costs, while regulators are layering on new compliance demands. Against that backdrop, many are actively re-evaluating workflows to see which stones have been left unturned.

One of the biggest culprits? Crew change logistics.

Despite being the second-largest cost driver in crewing operations (after salaries), crew logistics remain largely manual: coordinated over email chains, spreadsheets, and third-party travel agents. The result is a slow, opaque process riddled with inefficiencies. These inefficiencies come at a cost: initial data shows crew changes have a savings potential of as much as 24%, where Crew Managers are left with little visibility or control over what’s driving the variance.

Motion Ventures recently invested in Tilla, a Berlin-based startup purpose-built to tackle exactly this problem.

We believe Tilla’s early traction shows strong signs of product-market fit and that it’s a signal that core operational categories in maritime, which some might see as too fragmented or too niche to modernise, is getting a specialised software layer.

A $12B Problem That’s Still Handled by Hand

Every year, more than 10 million crew changes are handled across the global maritime fleet. The logistics behind each one are complex: vessel schedules are constantly shifting, travel restrictions change without notice, and bookings require coordination between seafarers, port agents, travel vendors, and onshore crew managers. And all with highly variable pricing structures.

While 70% of the global airline ticketing market is now tech-enabled, crew logistics has remained stuck in a legacy model. Most crew managers today still coordinate travel manually via third-party agents, often with limited visibility into pricing options, refund policies, or alternatives.

The scale of the opportunity is clear: the crew logistics market is worth $12 billion globally, and until recently, digital solutions struggled to gain meaningful adoption. We believe that’s changing.

Pressure on Ship Managers Is Redrawing the Software Map

There’s a broader story here: ship management itself is evolving.

As regulatory compliance gets more complex and operational demands rise, we’re seeing ship owners being forced to revisit how they approach internal operations. The past decades has seen a tide coming in for outsourced ship management… owners preferring to hand off to larger, third-party players who can achieve scale efficiencies and absorb the rising overhead. Klaveness’ recent sale of its in-house ship management arm to OSM Thome is just one of many examples.

These consolidations reflect a bigger trend: the professionalisation of ship management.

As that shift has taken hold, cost control and productivity tooling have changed from nice-to-haves to baseline expectations. We see the silent change that has happened in other industries (from finance teams adopting modern expense systems like Expensify, to sales orgs using automated outreach tools like Lemlist, to everyone now onboarding ChatGPT Plus), now also coming to maritime. As teams are under pressure to do more with less, they start turning to software with a clear business case.

Tilla’s Wedge: Execution-First, Impact-Driven

Tilla has built an AI-driven logistics hub for maritime crewing. Rather than replacing existing systems, it sits on top of current workflows, automating the most painful parts of crew change execution:

1. Crew managers select a port and initiate the crew change.

2. The system tenders travel options across multiple vendors.

3. It automatically monitors for price drops and switches to cheaper fares (leveraging the flexibility of seafarer tickets).

The result: up to 24% savings per crew change, and 40% less time spent on coordination.

The product simplicity in a complex process is what drew us to Tilla - and over the last 12 months is what has allowed Tilla to convert 100% of pilot customers into paid contracts. They’re live on close to 500 vessels, have completed over 35,000 crew changes, and are operating with zero churn.

More Than a Point Solution

While crew change execution is the beachhead, Tilla’s roadmap suggests a clear path to platform expansion:

• Scenario Planning: Choosing the optimal port based on cost and crew wellbeing;

• Digital Crew Operator: Automated triggers for vessel schedule changes or seafarer emergencies;

• Fintech Layer: Invoice auditing and expense management;

• Data Insights: Benchmarking and analytics on global crew change patterns.

Each module increases the system’s lock-in and relevance and opens up further monetisation potential. With a SaaS pricing model aligned to vessel count, this is a solution that scales with its customers.

Why We’re Backing Tilla

At Motion Ventures, our thesis for Ship Managers is built around a few core beliefs:

1. Maritime is entering a new software adoption phase: moving beyond dashboards and analytics with tools that embed into core workflows;

2. Ship managers and owners, especially as they consolidate, will spend more on tools that reduce cost and increase productivity;

3. Founders who can earn trust from managers (and deliver fast, tangible outcomes) will win.

Tilla sits squarely at that intersection. Founders Niklas and Narayan bring deep traveltech and enterprise product experience, and they’ve spent four years listening, learning and building accordingly. They’ve shown strong execution, a clear understanding of customer economics, and the ability to convert that insight into a product that solves the customer’s pains.

TL;DR

For years, crew logistics sat in the “too hard” bucket: too fragmented, too variable, too entrenched in manual workflows.

Tilla is proving that assumption wrong.

This investment reflects our view that maritime is ready for a new generation of operational tools, and that crew logistics is the next line item ripe for transformation.