When we started Motion Ventures 5 years ago, we set out to create the maritime future by picking and empowering the winning change-makers, connecting key players, and proving to the world that maritime is where the next generation of builders and capital should be looking. Ultimately, the investment standard we aim to achieve is to consistently create large-valued outcomes in maritime, the way fintech, healthcare, logistics, and many other industries do.

Looking ahead, we see two key gaps in the maritime investment space that urgently need to be addressed in order for the industry to enter its next phase of maturity and start creating those large-valued outcomes. 

First, the industry needs more diverse types of capital involved in the growth of businesses.

Being 5 years in and with so many positive outcomes and so much momentum already, it could be easy to lose sight that the maritime innovation story is still in its infancy. One of the clearest signs of its infancy is who hasn’t invested yet in the space. While there have been many investments in the Pre-seed to Series A stages, we need more and bigger investments throughout all financial stages – Series B and beyond – in order to scale the companies that already cleared the product-market-fit and early revenue milestones. 

We also need more diverse investors in the space: when the industry sees more maritime and sector-agnostic investors alike in the space, the companies that are getting investments in the early stages can fulfil their growth potential. Maritime is an incredibly attractive place to solve problems as a founder, corporate, and investor, yet most potential stakeholders aren’t even aware of the opportunities in the space – and that’s the key gap that we must close to truly succeed in transforming the industry in the long term. 

Then, there’s the structural gap that we need to close as an industry. 

Maritime is not simply a B2B industry, but rather a B2-multiple-B industry: for any maritime solution to see meaningful adoption, many diverse stakeholders and sub-ecosystems, from corporates and regulators to operators and functional experts across the entire maritime value chain, need to be completely aligned on achieving a single outcome. Overcoming that coordination hurdle is essential to any maritime technology success story, but we can’t expect founders, especially those without maritime domain knowledge, to navigate it on their own. While many VCs have adopted a platform or operator model as a strategic value-add for their portfolio companies, a high-functioning platform model is absolutely mandatory in maritime not just to offer operator insights, but to open doors, help see projects through, and provide feedback in order to navigate and transform such a deeply complex industry. 

We’re focused on closing these two gaps to build the flywheel that will build more momentum: As the industry attracts larger and more diverse capital sources, more world-class talent comes in, which then attracts more repeated investments, which leads to large exits at unicorn (or sea monster) level, and the returns from those exits get reinvested back into the space. It’s a systemic change we’re now focused on solving. 

Since January, I’ve been building the team that the maritime industry needs right now. Each individual I’ve brought on has achieved incredible things to close gaps in their own domains outside of maritime, and now brings that expertise to maritime:

• Adrian Ho, our Investment Director, has nearly 2 decades of experience deploying capital across all business stages, cross-border M&A, VC, and PE, as well as operating experience founding 2 startups of his own;

• Evan Han, our Head of Platform, co-founded and built a US$ 20m+ Series B market insights SaaS & services company globally with 350+ enterprise customers, and now supports our founders and engages the maritime industry to drive successful outcomes with our portfolio companies; 

• Rachel Dance, our Marketing Director, scaled StashAway's content, PR, brand, and product marketing functions from pre-Series A through Series D, navigating heavily regulated markets and challenging incumbents. While marketing is an uncommon role in most VCs, we believe effective storytelling is critical to attract and align the capital, talent, innovation, regulation and the players shaping maritime; 

• Devika Bade, our Strategic Partnerships Lead, built a 160+ stakeholder enterprise network at Blume Ventures and opened Fortune 100 doors for portfolio companies. On the one hand, there are many players who want to invest in maritime but they’re scattered or not yet engaged; and on the other hand, there are many investors who aren’t even aware of the maritime potential yet. Devika is setting out to bring both along and into our journey. 

These individuals each have the experience that the maritime industry has been missing, and bringing them on marks not only a new era at Motion, but also a new era for maritime.

Below you can find their profiles. I encourage you to reach out to them, as they’re all eager to transform this industry with you.

- Shaun Hon

Meet the team

Investment Director: Adrian Ho

Adrian Ho joined Motion Ventures in May 2026 as Investment Director, leading the investment function across both Fund I and Fund II. At Motion, he is responsible for making market-risk-adjusted, top-decile returns, built on his ruthlessly-honest, high-conviction investment decisions about which maritime companies to back, and when and how to exit them. Or as he puts it, "Our team is out to find legendary sea monsters, but we track them while they're still only eggs and little fishes."

Adrian has 17+ years of cross-border M&A, VC and PE experience spanning Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa, most recently as a Partner at Blueprint Ventures. He also held VP Investment roles at funds including Altara Ventures and Credence Partners, and senior corporate development positions in MNCs such as a Director at Binance and senior M&A roles at Li & Fung. He started his career as an Investment Banking Analyst at Barclays Capital. 

Adrian brings to Motion a full-spectrum investment skillset: He has worked across both developed and emerging markets, and he has firsthand insights into the full lifecycle of a company, growth and buyout private equity, corporate M&A and investment banking, and several exits. He also brings operating experience as an ex-founder as well as head of finance and strategy in 2 portfolio companies from his time in private equity.

What’s he most excited about these days? “Meeting exceptional founders solving asymmetrically large, difficult, and pressingly important problems in maritime. I’m excited to see what AI, robotics, and energy advances can do for shipbuilding, ports, vessel owners/operators, carriers and supply chain/logistics providers globally.”

Connect with Adrian on LinkedIn

Head of Platform: Evan Han

Evan Han joined Motion Ventures as Head of Platform. Developing our Platform comes from the conviction that the best maritime founders deserve more than just a cheque. As a founder himself for 13 years, Evan is the person we need in this seat. Previously, Evan was Co-founder, CFO, and CRO at Lynk, a Series B+ market insights SaaS & services startup born in Hong Kong & Singapore, which he helped scale into a global business with US$20m+ revenue, 350+ enterprise customers, and 300+ staff across a dozen offices globally. Prior to Lynk, he spent 6 years in investment banking & capital markets at J.P. Morgan & Citi across the US and APAC. Evan holds an MBA in Finance & Management from Wharton and a BA (Honors) in Economics & Statistics from UChicago.

Leading the Platform team, Evan focuses on expanding and harnessing the resources in our ecosystem to accelerate our portfolio companies’ growth and enable their success through commercial connections and operating expertise. This includes matching and introducing portfolio companies to corporate customers, operating experts, top-tier talent, co-investors, strategic partners, and potential acquirers. In other words, the Platform team packages Motion's industry-leading ecosystem into each portfolio company's unfair advantage.

What’s he most excited about these days? “In VC, Platform can have a huge and largely untapped impact on portfolio companies’ outcomes. Maritime founders face the unique challenge of commercial adoption, and so to accelerate innovation in the industry and ensure the success of our portfolio companies, our ecosystem is specifically designed to make adoption more deliberate and easier. There’s also increasingly more consolidation happening in the maritime tech space, and there’s much more we can do to facilitate exit strategies for our portfolio companies. I’m paying a lot of attention to how to scale the value that our Venture Partners and operating experts deliver to our founders and startups, as well as how AI can level up matching and connecting our portfolio companies to customers, talent, investors, and anything else they need to succeed.”

Connect with Evan on LinkedIn

Marketing Director: Rachel Dance

Rachel Dance brings over a decade of experience building and scaling marketing functions across Europe, Southeast Asia, and the US. As the first marketing hire at StashAway, she built up the entire content, PR, and product marketing functions over 6 years and 4 market expansions. She also lead marketing and brand at two mid-stage companies in Germany, where she managed €4 million budget and full marketing teams. With a sincere passion for supporting founders, she has served as an operator at Antler as well as independently to support dozens of early-stage founders globally on developing their operating structures and growth strategies.

With the story of where this industry is going, the people taking it there, and the opportunities ahead still largely untold, Rachel is responsible for building the voice of the maritime future, and cementing Motion as the definitive voice in maritime innovation. As an operator, she is also readily available to advise on any marketing topics for our portfolio companies. 

Rachel's expertise spans the most of the marketing stack: from brand strategy and content, to go-to-market and product marketing, UI/UX, CRM, PR, and executive thought leadership. She holds a B.S. in Management & Business and Environmental Studies from Skidmore College. After 6 years living in Singapore, she's currently based in Munich, Germany.

What is she most excited about? “With so much noise, we see that storytelling has never been more important for companies across all industries as it is today. And when it comes to maritime, no one has told the story at all. While maritime insiders have been acutely aware of the opportunities in ship optimisations to major reinventions of the entire industry, it’s still largely unknown to the rest of the world. The larger a light we shine on these opportunities, the more investors and founders alike will show up to participate, and the more Motion can play a critical role in shaping the future of maritime. Ultimately, when we look back, it won’t just be a venture capital story, but a maritime story that Motion played a huge role in.”

Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn

Strategic Partnerships Lead: Devika Bade

Devika Bade joined Motion Ventures to lead strategic partnerships. Her mandate is to bring maritime's first movers – the corporates leading the industry on innovation – into Motion's ecosystem, where they get first look at the technologies, founders and ideas shaping the industry's next decade. 

She has spent five years in venture, working across APAC and Africa, most recently at Blume Ventures leading go-to-market and partnerships work. Alongside that, she has advised corporates and venture studios on setting up their own venture arms, fund architecture, platform strategy, governance, and investment mandates, across India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. 

Her career started at Goldman Sachs, before a stretch working across multiple early-stage startups helping them navigate the zero-to-one journey. Since moving into venture, she has managed corporate relationships at scale, sat close to capital, and been directly accountable for revenue outcomes. She now leads fundraising and strategic partnerships for Motion Ventures' Fund, based in Singapore.

What’s she paying attention to right now? “Who partners with the future of this industry next. Maritime is evolving out of being a niche that only insiders care about. The world is starting to see how much sits on top of it: energy sovereignty, food security, data integrity, border security. These aren't separate problems, and the last few years have made the fault lines in everyone's supply chains very visible. The first movers understood that early, and they’re already building with us. So the question I’m most interested in is, ‘who joins them next?’.”

Connect with Devika on LinkedIn