Evangelos
Efstathiou

Somewhere right now a tanker is sitting outside a port, idling, burning money. Every hour it waits, a clock called laytime runs out, and a charge called demurrage starts ticking. Someone has to figure out who owes whom, comb through a stack of statements of fact and notices of readiness, and argue about it. That argument is Evangelos Efstathiou's entire business.

Most people in tech would not touch this. It is paperwork, maritime law, and decades-old spreadsheets. Efstathiou - Evan to almost everyone - looked at the same pile and saw the data backbone of global trade waiting to be built. "I want to build the Bloomberg of shipping," he says, and he means it as a 20 to 25 year project, not a private-equity flip.

He runs Burmester & Vogel, a Boston-based maritime software company that automates laytime calculation, demurrage management, and freight market intelligence. The firm has been doing this since 1983 - older than a fair number of the analysts who now use it. Today it serves more than 1,000 clients across over 100 countries, and Evan is busy teaching it to think.

The contrarian move

The standard founder playbook says: find an old, slow incumbent and disrupt it from the outside. Evan did the opposite. In 2019 he raised a $1.65 million Series A in September and, that November, simply bought the 40-year-old incumbent. Then he started rebuilding it from the inside, keeping the domain expertise that took four decades to accumulate and bolting generative AI onto it.

"Pivoting a 40-year-old company" is how he describes the job, and he does not pretend it is easy. The trick, in his telling, is respect: you do not throw away four decades of how shipping actually works just because you have a new model that can read documents. You digitize and refine "in places where no others thought were possible."

Why demurrage, of all things

The numbers explain the obsession. More than $50 billion is spent on demurrage globally every year. The average claim has historically taken over an hour to prepare, review, and audit - one ship, one voyage, one claim at a time. Multiply that across the world's fleets and you get an enormous, invisible drag on trade.

Evan frames it bigger than a software niche. "Shipping is the lifeblood of global trade," he says. "If we can reduce the cost of shipping, we're reducing a global tax on every person in the world." It is a salesman's line and an engineer's thesis at the same time. There is also a sustainability angle he is quick to point out: less idle vessel time means less fuel burned, so the efficiency that makes traders money also makes supply chains greener.

The machine under the hood

The product is the Demurrage AI Copilot, launched in the company's AI push that began in 2023. Behind it sits a patent-pending orchestration engine designed to ingest shipping documents of every type - the messy, inconsistent paperwork that has always defeated automation - and then calculate and compare demurrage on its own. The pitch is simple to say and hard to build: automate, verify, and settle laytime faster.

He took that pitch into a maritime "Shark Tank" at Posidonia 2024, one of the largest gatherings in the industry, and the company landed in The Maritime Executive for its AI work. In 2025 he kept expanding the footprint, acquiring Laysoft, a Windows-based laytime calculation product, and joining Aethos AI, a responsible-AI community for maritime technology.

Twenty years on the water

None of this came out of nowhere. Evan graduated from MIT in 2000 and never really left shipping afterward. He moved through senior global sales and product roles at Marsoft, Veson Nautical, SpecTec, and Chinsay - the names that quietly run freight trading, operations scheduling, and asset risk management behind the scenes. He learned where the bodies are buried in maritime software before he owned any of it.

In 2016 he founded Skysail Advisors, an M&A and strategy consultancy that works across maritime, aviation, and railroad. Skysail, as he puts it, combines data-science and software know-how with deep industry relationships. It was the on-ramp: the advisory work taught him the deals, and the deals led to owning the asset he advises on. He still runs both.

What he is actually betting on

The throughline is patience in an industry that rewards it. Evan is not trying to win a quarter. He is trying to make maritime claims settle themselves, to turn a four-decade brand into a high-growth tech company without snapping it in half, and to become the place the whole industry checks for the number. The Bloomberg comparison is ambitious to the point of cheeky. It is also exactly the kind of thing you say out loud only if you have spent twenty years close enough to the problem to believe it is possible.