Motion Ventures
- argyris93
- Dec 15, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2025
What’s Motion Ventures’ investment thesis?
Maritime is global, complex, and vital. Yet, it remains one of the least digitised industries in the world.
At Motion Ventures, we back founders who are reimagining how vessels, ports, and logistics operate through digitalisation and decarbonisation.
We focus on catalysing digital and energy transitions across global supply chains by investing in early-stage B2B teams tackling real operational pain points, from emissions compliance and vessel optimisation to port operations and remote collaboration.
We look for founders who understand that maritime moves through collaboration, not disruption alone. The best innovations work with the industry to modernise it from within.
How is Motion Ventures structured differently from traditional VCs?
Our structure sets us apart. Motion Ventures is built as a consortium, bringing together corporates, startups, and capital under one roof.
For founders, this means direct access to pilot opportunities and decision-makers.
For corporates, it’s a de-risked pathway to explore, test and adopt innovation.
For investors, it’s a way to back solutions with a clearer route to adoption.
We like to say we operate at the intersection of innovation and industry - a bridge that helps good ideas become real-world solutions.
What kind of companies does Motion invest in?
We invest primarily at the Seed and Series A stages: the point where founders are ready to scale from prototype to proof, and where our industry network can provide the most value.
Our typical initial investment is up to US$ 1.5m, with capacity to follow on with up to US$ 10m as companies grow. Our goal is to ensure the right stakeholders are at the table to accelerate adoption.
We’ve led, co-led, and followed rounds depending on what best supports the founder.
We’re long-term partners, typically holding investments for up to ten years. This is long enough to support founders through product validation, market entry, and industry adoption cycles. Maritime moves deliberately, and we move with it.
We back teams building tangible, differentiated products, both software and hardware, that drive efficiency, automation, and sustainability across global supply chains.
What We Look For
Three things matter most: teams that execute, products that differentiate, and alignment with the industry.
Our guiding question is simple: Will this solution create real value for the industry? Founders who can work with maritime's existing rhythms rather than trying to disrupt from the outside stand out. We look for transparency, adaptability, and curiosity to learn from industry stakeholders.
As part of diligence, we test how startups engage with our consortium partners. Can they run a pilot that leads to measurable ROI? Can they integrate into existing workflows without friction? These signals tell us more about long-term potential than short-term traction alone.
What’s your investment process like?
Every partnership starts with an initial conversation to understand a company’s market, team, and product edge. From there we dive deeper, reviewing materials, exploring go-to-market dynamics, and testing alignment with our corporate network.
We move deliberately but decisively. Once fit is clear, we streamline due diligence and move quickly to a term sheet. Our Investment Committee brings together industry, operational, financial, and technical expertise to ensure each deal is sound and positioned for real-world success.
How do you support founders beyond capital?
Great founder–investor relationships are built on trust and transparency.
We maintain a regular rhythm with our portfolio: monthly operational touchpoints and quarterly strategy reviews. This gives us visibility into day-to-day progress while creating space for forward-looking conversations.
We often take board seats to stay engaged in each company’s growth journey, balancing strategic oversight with hands-on support where needed. Our involvement differs depending on what the portfolio company most needs at that point of time. This is because different stages of a business will require different playbooks in maritime. Across productisation, commercialisation, hiring and scaling operations, we aim to help solve the one thing that removes all other blockers and we're excited to partner with them throughout each stage.
Fundraising support is about bringing the most relevant investor or investors to each stage of the company’s growth who can be most impactful to the startups' success. When challenges arise, we adapt: sometimes rolling up our sleeves, other times stepping back into an advisory role. What never changes is alignment. Every decision aims to serve the founder’s long-term success.
Track Record
Our first fund, Fund I, was launched in 2021 and invested in more than 25 companies globally, from Singapore to Europe and the US. Within three years, two of those startups achieved profitable exits:
DeepSea Technologies (acquired)
HarborLab (exited)
Those early exits demonstrated that maritime innovation is not only viable but accelerating.
Fund II builds on this momentum with a larger fund size, bigger network of corporates, and ability to back both digital and hardware solutions, catalysing digitalisation and energy transitions across global supply chains.
What Motion Ventures Brings to the Table
We don't just invest in maritime tech. We invest in its acceleration. Our role is to ensure that great ideas don't stay as pilots but become industry standards.
Speed matters, but alignment wins. We back founders who can work shoulder to shoulder with an industry that's transforming one vessel, one port, one workflow at a time. That's where Motion Ventures thrives: at the intersection of innovation and adoption.
We measure impact by the number of founders scaling across fleets, ports, and supply chains, not just by returns on a spreadsheet. Our strength comes from being practitioners with sector depth, not thought leaders making proclamations. We share insights as observations, not mandates.
The maritime industry is complex and hard, but it's not broken. It rewards partnership and collaboration. It responds to proof, not promises. That's the rhythm we've learned to work within, and it's what makes our consortium model effective.
At Motion Ventures, we’re proud to help the industry move faster, together.
Sector Expertise and Long-Term View
We’ve been in maritime innovation since our first fund, and we’ve learned that trust and proof matter more than bold claims. The industry rewards execution over promises, a principle that shapes how we evaluate and support founders.
The next decade will be defined by scaling both the digital and physical infrastructures, platforms
and applications. Point solutions are evolving into broader platforms. Hardware adoption is accelerating alongside digital tools, driven by regulation and customer demand to decarbonise.
We’re seeing corporates take bolder leaps with enterprise-wide rollouts, and that shift changes what kind of traction truly matters.
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