Rising Star of the week: Unafix

A new concept is coming to life at EUROPORT 2021, the Rising Stars Pavilion powered by MARPRO. An area fully dedicated for promising maritime start-ups and next-gen innovators, where they can demonstrate how they contribute to a smarter, cleaner or/safer maritime future.

EUROPORT’s and MARPRO’s intention is to provide small start-ups a fair chance of showing their products and services to a large audience like EUROPORT is, for a budget friendly participation fee.

Company profile: Unafix

Since the news aired officially, the call to maritime start-ups has been answered and a great deal of interest has been shown to participate.

Unafix, founded by a Dutch legal counsel in maritime law, is putting the finishing touches on an AI-based powerful fixture generator that helps you draft unambiguous fixture notes with extreme efficiency.

Unafix is currently beta-testing their service and they expect to go live on August 1^st, 2021. MARPRO supports innovative solutions for maritime professionals. MARPRO connects maritime professionals, and in collaboration with the Unafix team, we’re giving you an exclusive possibility to help Unafix in their final stages of development by testing their product. In return, you get three months of completely free access to the final product starting in August, no strings attached. Click here to go to their MARPRO sign-up form to learn more about this exclusive partnership.

Make acquaintance of Unafix in the following interview:

What is the idea behind Unafix and its services?

Some 27,000 dry cargo vessels worldwide are regularly contracted to perform voyages. The contracts that govern the relationship between the Owner of the Ship and the Charterer of the ship are called “Fixture Charter Parties” or “Fixture notes”. These fixture notes are extremely complex legal documents and any ambiguity therein can result in time and money consuming disputes.

Unafix, whose founder holds a degree in maritime law, is delivering a self-learning, artificial intelligence based Fixture Note Generator. The Unafix AI assistance helps Owners, Charterers and Brokers to mitigate their exposure to potential disputes by up to 80% whilst simultaneously significantly reducing the time it takes to draft and conclude a fixture note.

How can Unafix contribute to a smarter maritime future?

Owners, Charterers and Brokers all share the same core activity: to charter or charter out commercial vessels. Fixture notes are at the very heart of their operations. The most recent significant revolution the industry has seen in this regard was the transition to e-mail based ship fixing. This revolution has resulted in efficiency gains, but also contributed to increasingly complex fixture notes.

Unafix is helping users to break down the legal complexity of fixture notes. Our artificial intelligence algorithms take the User’s fixture note desired end result and translates that into unambiguous clauses that accurately reflect what the user had in mind during drafting and negotiating of these terms. The AI algorithm is so efficient, that disputes between Owners and Charterers are reduced by up to 80%

How can Unafix contribute to a cleaner or safer maritime future?

We fully support the ambitious goals regarding environmental impact reduction the industry has imposed on itself and the industry’s commitment to enhancing the safety of those involved. Apportionment of both effort as well as the monetary investments that come with these ambitions takes place in fixture notes, and BIMCO has provided the industry with a number of leading standard clauses to support these ambitions.

As a legal self-help platform, our commitment to these goals is to promote clauses that further the industry’s sustainability ambitions. With BIMCO’s permission, have integrated amongst others their slow steaming clause and various others promoting safety and sustainability on board and in business processes.

Where is Unafix in 5 years from now?

Our ambition is to work with all industry stakeholders, including Underwriters, ports and law firms, to further increase our dispute prevention rate to 90%. Thanks to the scalability of and ease-to-implement nature of our solution we can expand to meet our goal of 50,000 Unafix supported fixture notes in 2025.

To offer our users with our high standards of support every aspect, our team of maritime lawyers, brokers and software engineers will have quadrupled in size by 2025.

How is Unafix organized, and who are the key people?

Our executive team reflects the three key qualities required to successfully navigate our solution to a broader, innovation embracing audience within the maritime industries:

• Head of software development & AI-architect: Johannes Elzinga
• Head of commercial operations: Wessel Holwerda
• Founder and in-house maritime legal counsel: Jeroen Wolthuis