A tanker is an unusually large place to hide a useful fact. You can watch it move across the sea and still have questions about its cargo, its destination and what its arrival will do to a market. Fabio Kuhn has built a company around those questions. The vessel is visible. The commercial meaning takes rather more work.
Kuhn co-founded Vortexa in 2016 with Etienne Amic, after running BP’s global trading and analytics technology teams. He had worked inside a business in which information could change the economics of a voyage. His new company would try to give traders a more detailed view of the physical energy moving around them.
The appeal of this problem is easy to appreciate without ever having chartered a ship. Buying and selling depend on what people know. Oil also depends on what actually arrives. Kuhn’s career has gathered around the awkward interval between the two.
An internet company before twenty
Vortexa was a return to entrepreneurship. Kuhn says he started an internet company at eighteen and sold it two years later. Graduate school in the early 2000s followed, then a short spell in Silicon Valley venture capital and several years as a statistical arbitrage quantitative trader in San Francisco. Eventually he moved into energy, working at Uniper before BP.
“I’ve always loved the intersection of technology, markets and quantitative modelling,” he said in 2019. That is a useful description of a career whose job titles otherwise appear to require several business cards. The common interest is the relationship between information and a decision worth making.
His education crossed similar boundaries: business administration at UNIFACS, an MBA in finance and strategy at Purdue, a Stanford graduate certificate in quantitative methods in finance and risk management, and a Harvard Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies focused on information management systems. His professional biography also includes work at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California.
That combination helps explain the particular business he chose. Energy trading gave him a practical setting for his interests in computing and markets. The education supplied several ways to examine it. A person could spend a career on any one of these subjects; Kuhn kept returning to the places where they meet.
When the sky became useful to the desk
The opening for Vortexa involved changes far above the trading floor. Lower-cost satellites were generating more observations. Cloud computing offered ways to process information at scale. Machine learning provided tools for interpreting it. Vortexa’s account of its beginnings places these developments together: more evidence about the world, and more capacity to make something useful from it.
Amic brought experience leading European energy businesses at JPMorgan and Mercuria. Kuhn brought the technology perspective from inside energy trading. Their shared industry background mattered because a collection of satellite signals does not arrive with a trader’s questions helpfully attached. Someone has to know which questions deserve an answer.
The company combines data and machine learning with oversight from energy specialists. Its work connects cargo flows, vessels, freight and inventories. The resulting picture is intended for people making commercial decisions, including traders, analysts and charterers. The point of gathering the information is to make it usable at the moment a decision has to be made.
There is a certain modesty imposed by physical trade. A model must contend with vessels, ports and cargoes that have schedules of their own. Kuhn’s business depends on connecting that physical activity to a screen without losing the details that make the screen worth consulting.
People first. Then the data.
In 2017, discussing artificial intelligence, Kuhn ranked people ahead of data in an AI company’s assets. He also stressed that useful training data could accelerate improvement. This was an early statement of priorities from a founder whose product might otherwise be described entirely in terms of algorithms.
His comments on recruiting were equally specific. Finding capable people was the central challenge, and London’s AI talent was a reason to build there. That makes the company’s geography part of its technical story. A location can offer a pool of colleagues as well as an address.
By June 2026, Vortexa described a team of more than 180 experts across London, Geneva, Singapore, New York, Houston and the UAE. The disciplines include market knowledge as well as engineering and data science. For Kuhn, assembling those people has been part of building the product itself.
The partner test happens on a bad day
Kuhn’s account of choosing Notion Capital offers a more personal measure of judgement. He got to know Patrick Norris and the firm for more than a year before the investment partnership. He paid attention to their behaviour during difficulties. The memorable part was that they offered help before becoming investors.
“They never blinked on the downs,” he recalled in 2020. It is a short line with a fairly demanding specification for a business relationship. Anyone can enjoy a promising forecast. A partner becomes useful when the forecast needs revising.
In the same account, Kuhn described the difficulty of living with unfinished work and competing priorities. A founder can see what needs doing and still lack the resources to do all of it. He also described employees as owners, with equity connecting their work to the company’s outcome. Conviction, in this telling, has to coexist with practical limits.
“They never blinked on the downs.”
Fabio Kuhn, on getting to know Notion Capital, 2020
Michael Jordan, with financial data
For a glimpse of Kuhn away from the vocabulary of cargo analytics, consider his response to Communitas Capital taking a stake in Vortexa in April 2023. The firm’s founders included former Thomson Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer, former NYSE chief executive Duncan Niederauer and former Instinet chief executive Doug Atkin.
Kuhn compared the Glocer partnership to Michael Jordan joining a basketball team. Financial information had acquired a sporting metaphor. The comparison also made his enthusiasm quite legible: he was welcoming experience in building businesses around information that other people pay to trust.
That year also brought a partnership with Energy Aspects, which would use Vortexa cargo-tracking analytics in its research on crude, refined products and LNG. In April 2024, Neal Goldman became Vortexa’s chairman. Goldman’s background included founding Capital IQ and Relationship Science. The people around Kuhn increasingly reflected the business he was building: specialised information delivered into consequential working routines.
A voyage needs a price, too
In January 2024, Vortexa announced a $34 million Series C led by funds managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. Existing investors also participated. The stated uses included international expansion, technology and service. A $25 million debt financing with CIBC Innovation Banking followed in October. These were different financing instruments supporting the company’s expansion.
The product moved closer to another everyday trading question in February 2025. Anywhere Freight Pricing launched with rates for more than 50,000 active clean petroleum product routes. It offered route comparisons, port and canal fee breakdowns, and five years of historical pricing. The launch specified daily price updates at 4:30 p.m. UK time.
For someone considering a cargo movement, that fills in an essential part of the arithmetic. An attractive price at the destination must survive the cost of getting there. Kuhn’s company was moving from describing the traffic towards helping customers evaluate the trip.
The next step looked ahead. In June 2026, Anywhere Freight Pricing Forecasts added projections up to ninety days out. The inputs included physical cargo flows, vessel availability, fleet positioning and arbitrage economics. Users could examine the physical drivers behind a projected rate, giving them a way to question the result.
The forward horizon announced for Vortexa’s freight forecasts in June 2026. A projection customers can inspect, alongside their own judgement.
Consider a hypothetical cargo that looks profitable at today’s freight rate but would need a ship several weeks from now. A useful forecast gives the desk another set of assumptions to examine before committing. Visibility into its drivers lets the customer ask whether vessel availability or cargo demand is doing the work. That is a more demanding task than displaying a number with a date beside it.
The progression is revealing. First understand what is moving. Then calculate what moving it costs. Then investigate what might change those costs. Each step brings Kuhn’s original information problem closer to the decision someone is preparing to make.
The next question is already on the desk
April 2026 brought a $50 million strategic debt financing with Oxford Finance. In September, Richard Quin joined as Vortexa’s first chief strategy officer, responsible for strategy, data partnerships and market analysis, alongside growth initiatives. His previous roles included chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at Kpler.
In September 2025, Kuhn joined Samantha Hartke for a nineteen-minute Liquid Currents episode looking back on the company’s Innovation Series in London, Singapore, Houston and New York. Innovation, market shifts and volatility were the subjects. His public conversations keep returning to the setting in which his technology has to earn its place: the working energy market.
Kuhn’s October LinkedIn posts followed the company’s Innovation Series through Singapore, Dubai, New York, Houston and London. He described conversations with customers as helping shape what the company builds next. The traveller in this part of the story is the founder, carrying questions back from people using the product.
His stated ambition has remained connected to a physical outcome: helping energy reach the place and time it is needed. The company has added products, colleagues and financing around that aim. A tanker still has to make its voyage. Kuhn’s continuing project is to reduce the amount of that journey a trading desk has to imagine.