Roughly 4,900 technology suppliers now sell into maritime. Since 2017 the sector has clocked 381 acquisitions, including 52 deals last year alone, against cumulative venture capital investment of around $3bn. Those numbers, laid out by Su Yin Anand, CEO of GlobalOre and co-founder of The Captain's Table, framed last week's SplashTech Digital Leaders Forum in Singapore — and framed an uncomfortable question for anyone underwriting maritime software: can the sector produce genuinely scalable companies, or is most of it ultimately building acquisition targets?

Anand's provocation was blunt. "Maritime sub-verticals are too small to support a standalone company at scale," she told the opening session.

The commercial consequence for founders and their backers is stark: exit-by-acquisition is not a fallback but the structural baseline, and the 52 deals recorded last year suggest consolidators are already pricing that reality. For carriers and shipowners, the same dynamics cut the other way — a fragmented vendor base means short technology shelf lives and integration risk, but also steady opportunities to acquire proven tools rather than build them.

The panel ranged across connectivity, AI, capital discipline and customer intimacy, but the strongest theme was older than any current buzzword: understanding what shipping customers will actually pay for, and how slowly they pay for it.

Ben Palmer, president of Viasat Commercial, argued connectivity has crossed the line from novelty to infrastructure — and that the shift makes it more valuable, not less. "It should be boringly reliable and it should be boringly consistent and it should be boringly available when you need it," he said. That boring reliability is the base layer for remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, augmented reality, CCTV and increasingly AI-enabled applications onboard.

Palmer also had a warning for vendors pitching into shipping. "It's actually a customer understanding of a real customer problem that needs solving at scale," he said, contrasting that with startups arriving armed with "a hypothesis around a problem that customers, in your view, ought to be wanting to solve".

The capital side of the equation is broadening. Marina Hadjipateras, co-founder and general partner at TMV, said government, logistics, industrial and maritime money increasingly overlap, and more founders are entering shipping from outside the traditional ecosystem — with talent arriving from companies such as SpaceX and Scale AI.

"You're seeing more entrepreneurs who want to play in the maritime space than you've seen before," she said. But maritime still demands a different investment mindset from mainstream technology. Reflecting on Nautilus Labs, an early high-profile maritime software bet, Hadjipateras said the company raised heavily and tried to expand at a pace that did not match shipping's buying behaviour. "They wanted to grow to an amount that in the maritime world, it doesn't happen that way," she said.

The lesson is patience. "It takes time. It's sticky. So when it works, it works really well," she told delegates — a formulation that captures the sector's core pitch to limited partners: slow sales, but durable revenue once landed.

Morten Lind-Olsen, CEO of Dualog, reinforced the point, arguing investors have improved at valuing people and organisations but still frequently misunderstand shipping itself. "If you want to invest in a company that is providing solutions to this industry, you need to understand the industry," he said. Expecting conventional venture-style returns within five to seven years can be "extremely unrealistic", he argued, noting that even relatively straightforward software deployments can take several years.

For technology suppliers, Lind-Olsen said the most durable asset is not the code. "The biggest value any company has is the customer relation," he said. "The technology itself will probably be replaced very fast."

Ingrid Kylstad, managing director of Klaveness Digital, pointed to the less glamorous problems still unresolved inside shipping organisations. CargoValue, she explained, evolved from trying to connect decisions across supply chain and shipping teams that often operate with limited visibility of each other. "The left hand does something, it has consequences for the right hand, but they can't see it in time to manage it," Kylstad said. Sales cycles for major maritime software can easily stretch to 18 months.

"You do need to have thoughtful capital, patient capital behind you to do this," she advised. Kylstad also warned owners that building technology internally changes what business they are in. "You're no longer in shipping. You're in technology, you're in software," she said, adding that companies cannot tell teams to innovate while measuring them against conventional short-term profitability targets.

Nakul Malhotra, vice president, emerging opportunities portfolio at Wilhelmsen Group, put the current investment boom in context. The sector only really came of age around covid, he argued, as disrupted supply chains pushed shipping into public consciousness and attracted outside founders and capital. Wilhelmsen itself has cycled through venture building, partnerships, startup collaborations and fund investments, including Motion Ventures. There is no single right model. "I'm an and kind of a person, not an or kind of a person," he said.

For smaller shipowners, Malhotra advised realism. He divided shipping broadly into a top 10% with the resources to run R&D, a bottom 25% potentially struggling with future complexity, and a middle 65% that should adopt proven technologies rather than behave like experimental customers. "You're looking for credible solutions with a track record that comes from the experimentation of the people with the deeper pockets," he said.

The takeaway for shippers, carriers and forwarders watching the vendor space: consolidation will likely accelerate, with the 52 acquisitions recorded last year setting the pace, while the middle 65% of owners get the best value from technologies already de-risked by the biggest players. Technology may be getting faster. Maritime, the panel suggested, still moves at its own speed.