Cluster Insight With Hefring Marine

Hefring Marine are looking for the right development and manufacturing partners that can help them standardize and grow their intelligent navigation support solution.

Cluster Insight is a column where we ask six questions to catch a glimpse into the daily business-lives of the partners and members of GCE Ocean Technology.

This week, we spoke with Karl Birgir Björnsson, to learn more about him and his work at Hefring Marine. A company based in Reykjavik and that offers an intelligent navigation support solution for commercial and recreational vessels alike.

1. What is your role in Hefring Marine?

I am the CEO and founder of Hefring Marine.

2. Your primary focus at work right now is?

Building up our business and sales infrastructure, establishing partnerships, developing the next generation of our product, and ensuring that we are adequately financed to achieve all of this.

3. Biggest challenges and opportunities for Hefring Marine in the future?

Firstly, Hefring Marine is an intelligent navigation support solution. It helps boat and vessel operators select the safest weather-adaptive route, optimize speed and make the right decisions to ensure that trips are safe, comfortable and efficient. It also logs all trip data to keep track of when, how, and by whom a vessel has been operated.

You can view how the system works in our Youtube video.

The solution and approach is novel and we are working on carving out a market for ourselves. This entails challenges in terms of testing and developing the right business and service model. Another challenge is scalability, but we want to make our solution accessible across markets, modular to meet different demands, and available when needed. We are therefore looking for the right development and manufacturing partners that can help us standardize and grow.

We see opportunities in the adoption of intelligent technology across different industries and the same being applied in boating and maritime. Research into and adoption of autonomous vessels will push this progress further, but more technology is emerging every year that helps to grow the market for intelligent solutions in the industry.

Our solution can be applied across segments, from leisure boats to fishing and tactical vessels, or even as a navigation tool for autonomous vessels, and at a later stage upward into larger vessels. The opportunities are therefore vast, and we must simply overcome a few obstacles along the way to get there.

4. Best part of being member in a cluster?

Access to network and connections and keeping up to date about how other companies in the industry are progressing.

5. Your business motto

"Þetta reddast" (Icelandic - English) meaning "Everything will work out fine somehow".

6. Which cluster member should we interview next?

I would like to hear from Offshore Sensing AS.

Thank you for the insight Karl Birgir.