Company · February 2025
Our story.
Marintel started from a specific frustration: watching a maritime deal almost collapse because of a contradiction between two documents that were both in the data room.
Sotiri Dushas spent years in maritime finance and ship management before co-founding Marintel. Daryl Wallace brought experience in software and data infrastructure. What brought them together was a shared frustration with the gap between what maritime transactions required and what the available tools provided.
The founding insight was simple: the documents in a maritime deal room contain more information than anyone reads. Not because the documents are too long or the parties aren't diligent — but because the volume, the time pressure, and the number of cross-references make it structurally impossible for humans to catch everything.
The first version
The first version of Marintel was a document upload tool with basic classification — it could identify a class certificate from a P&I certificate from an MOA. Simple, but useful. Maritime professionals told us that just knowing what was in the data room without reading everything was valuable.
The second version added extraction: key fields pulled from each document type — vessel IMO, parties, delivery dates, payment milestones. The structured data that let you compare across documents.
The third version added what makes Marintel different: cross-document reconciliation. The ability to read two documents side by side and flag where they disagree. That's when the platform became genuinely useful for due diligence.
What we learned from early users
The consistent feedback from early users was that the value wasn't in any single finding — it was in the confidence that nothing had been missed. Maritime professionals who used Marintel didn't trust it because it found things they would have found anyway. They trusted it because it found things they wouldn't have — and confirmed that the things it didn't flag weren't there.
That's a different kind of value from a document analysis tool. Not "here's a summary" — but "here's everything relevant, with a citation for each finding, and I've checked everything."
Where we are now
Marintel today is the platform described on this site: deal rooms with role-based access, AI document intelligence trained on maritime contract forms, immutable audit trails, and AI-augmented valuations. We serve ship owners, buyers, brokers, lawyers, and banks involved in maritime S&P and newbuild transactions.
We're still a small team. We're still building. But we're building for the specific needs of maritime transactions — not adapting a generic tool to a specialised domain.