Life Finder Systems, an Ideon Scale Up, Secures First Commercial Breakthrough with Order from Wallenius Wilhelmsen
Life Finder Systems, a Lund-based company, has achieved its first commercial breakthrough with an order from the American fleet of the shipping company Wallenius Wilhelmsen, known as Arc (American Roll-On Roll-Off Carrier).
The order covers one of the fleet’s nine vessels, with options for the remaining eight, and will equip the crew with the Lund company’s safety sensors. These IoT sensors can locate crew members on the ship, detect temperature anomalies, and even determine if someone has fallen overboard. The technology is expected to be particularly useful in emergencies.
“We have been working with Arc since last fall and have managed to solve a major challenge they have faced on their ships, which is a challenge for the entire marine fleet. There is currently no other technology that can reliably find the crew in the event of an accident. The industry works extremely hard on safety, but accidents still happen and the crew are very vulnerable,” Life Finder’s CEO, Anders Schening, told Rapidus.
Arc is the Swedish-Norwegian Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s brand in the United States. With 128 vessels, 9,500 employees, and annual revenue exceeding 5 billion dollars, the shipping company is the world’s largest in so-called Ro-Ro transportation, which refers to “roll on, roll off” vehicle transportation.
“It’s a big breakthrough for us and we believe it will create ripples. Wallenius has been in the background all along while we have been negotiating with Arc. They want to test the technology in a smaller fleet now and see the possibility of implementing it across the entire shipping company, including port operations,” says Anders Schening, continuing: “They like the scalability of the infrastructure we offer, with hardware and software that communicate with both our and others’ sensors and integrate with existing alarm systems. Our goal is to create a new industry standard.”
Life Finder has so far raised approximately 7 million kronor in new share issues, and this summer the plan is to raise a couple more million. “It will be a smaller bridge of about 2 million kronor for the next scaling,” says Anders Schening.
In summary, Life Finder Systems has developed a groundbreaking safety technology that can locate crew members on ships and detect emergencies. Their first major customer is the shipping giant Wallenius Wilhelmsen, and the company is poised for significant growth.
This is a translation of Rapidus’ article. Click to read it. (in Swe)
