Case study
We laid the groundwork for a shipping company’s AI venture by crafting a compelling proposition, validating market potential, and securing early commercial traction.
ARR sales pipelines built
Serviceable market opportunity within ship management confirmed
ARR sales pipelines built
Serviceable market opportunity within ship management confirmed
In Southeast Asia’s shipping sector, where most of the region’s trade moves by sea, fleet managers, particularly those based in key regional hubs like Singapore, work under intense pressure. They must coordinate schedules to ensure compliance and assess vessel readiness while using fragmented systems with often more than thirty software solutions. This disjointed, high-pressure, error-prone environment creates inefficiencies, incomplete visibility into vessel readiness, and exposure to operational risk.
In an industry where even minor disruptions can cascade into multimillion-dollar losses, ShipCo*, a leading shipping management company, needed a scalable solution to deliver real-time operational visibility, ensure fleet and crew seaworthiness, and meet complex global compliance requirements, without relying on fragmented manual workflows.
AI technology showed immense promise, but off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) lacked the domain depth and operational nuance required for maritime decision-making. ShipCo set up an in-house team of domain and AI experts to build a platform capable of reasoning, acting, and adapting in real-world, high-stakes shipping environments by orchestrating best-in-class components across the LLM and tooling ecosystem.
ShipCo was trying to solve problems that are common to the entire sector; third-party and in-house ship managers experience the same inefficiencies, fragmentation, and compliance burden. ShipCo’s AI platform had the potential to serve an industry-wide need. Recognizing this, Bain and ShipCo’s leadership worked closely to build a launch-ready venture from the inside out.
We began by validating a multimillion-dollar commercial opportunity across shipping, logistics, and supply chain operations, including a $250 million immediate, addressable market with ship management. We also benchmarked competitors and confirmed the platform’s technical maturity and scalability. These steps de-risked the launch and laid the foundation to drive scale.
To determine venture readiness, we generated insights across four key areas: market, users, technology, and competition. Then we assessed defensibility, tech competitiveness, and the commercial potential of the platform. More than 50 interviews with customers, ecosystem players, and maritime experts confirmed strong market pull. The platform’s mature, scalable AI directly addressed critical gaps for third-party fleet managers.
We sized the market opportunity by benchmarking the platform’s offerings against other leading AI platforms and maritime-focused solutions, identifying white space and points for differentiation to ensure sufficient headroom for growth. We then built a portfolio of mission-critical use cases and involved end users in the platform’s development to identify a clear list of near-term improvements. The combination of positive feedback and a lack of dominant competitors gave us the confidence to deem the platform market ready.
With market validation complete, we partnered with ShipCo to develop a comprehensive venture strategy that could build their proven technology into a scalable business.
Our venture launch strategy focused on five pillars, spanning go-to-market execution (sales, marketing, and customer success), product development, talent acquisition, brand, and legal structure. We anchored the venture’s operating model across two hubs: tech development in India, and leadership, operations, and business development in Singapore. Singapore served three critical roles: It was the base for our talent workstream, a gateway to maritime decision-makers, and a launchpad for early customer engagement. This multi-dimensional advantage enabled us to attract top go-to-market talent, build strong relationships with regional industry leaders, and validate commercial demand early. We prioritized founder-grade leaders with AI scaling experience, maritime familiarity, and a proven ability to transition corporate-born technology into independent ventures.
This integrated approach built measurable traction in advance of the planned launch. Through detailed market analysis and customer validation, we did the following:
This comprehensive approach delivered advantages that many startups lack: validated market fit, a first paying customer, and a talent and capital pipeline. Our venture-building expertise, grounded in rigorous market validation, user-led design, and a scalable operating model architecture, we built the foundation for rapid adoption and long-term growth of ShipCo’s AI venture.
Over the course of six months, the team moved from early validation to ensuring the venture was launch ready—aligning stakeholders, refining the platform through user feedback, and building the foundation for scale.
*We take our clients' confidentiality seriously. While we've changed their names, the results are real.
With Innovation & Business Building, Bain is an appointed venture studio partner of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) as part of its Corporate Venture Launchpad 3.0 program (CVL 3.0). Designed to enable corporates and scale-ups to launch new ventures from Singapore, the program provides funding and support to help companies.
