FrontM catches a new wave of funding with $1.5 million pre-Series A round

UK-based start-up FrontM, which provides a collaboration app to the maritime industry, has raised $1.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round to ‘accelerate’ operations.  

The round was led by Jenson Funding Partners, Tradeworks.vc, Motion Ventures and a syndicate of Mar-Tech investors. 

By utilising its super-app and low-code developer framework to enable the likes of telehealth, video conferencing, remote assistance, tracking and monitoring for ships, the platform enhances connectivity between ship-shore teams - using Edge Computing and AI technology to effectively maximise the value of available bandwidth of existing satellite connections.

“FrontM team’s vision and conviction stood out from our first meeting, and their execution has matched that. Their understanding of the communications and efficiency challenges within the maritime industry and the solution that they’ve built to remedy that is exceptional. The industry is vital to global transport and productivity - and businesses have been in need of a platform that solves these problems. We’ve supported FrontM from pre-Covid seed stages and are very happy to continue to do so,” says Jeffrey Faustin, Partner and CIO of Jenson Funding Partners.

"Since our Covid-pivot, we evolved our maritime-focused product roadmap and completed a range of initial rollouts. I’m hugely excited to have the backing of eminent maritime investors who share our vision and are equally passionate about digitally empowering people,” says Kiran Venkatesh, Co-founder and CEO of FrontM.

FrontM says it will use the funds to further it developments ‘to solve the connectivity and efficiency challenges that maritime businesses and its mobile workforces or customers face when operating in remote and low bandwidth environments’.

"FrontM fits our ‘Digital Trade Enabler’ investment thesis. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a start-up that will do more to digitalise ship operations than FrontM, simply by enabling crews to use the available bandwidth much more effectively. The multi-sided business model benefits from significant network effects, allowing FrontM to scale rapidly and significantly increase the scope of its value proposition over time. We’ve been following Kiran and his team for more than a year now, and we’re really pleased with their performance,” says Niklas Holck, CEO of Tradeworks.vc.