Windward

Windward is a maritime AI platform. Two former Israeli Navy officers, Ami Daniel and Matan Peled, founded it in Tel Aviv in 2010. On 6 December 2021 it listed on London's AIM stock market under the ticker WNWD, selling 22.258 million shares at 155p. That gave it a £126.5m market cap and raised roughly £26.3m in new capital — the first Israeli technology float in the City in more than five years.

From defence intelligence to commercial insurance. Windward began by selling naval-intelligence tools to the US Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the United Nations. It shifted into insurance, banking, and trading in 2019, when XL Innovate (AXA XL's insurtech fund) led a $16.5M Series C round aimed at marine-insurer growth. That same year Windward launched its Insurance Suite — three products called Evaluate, Predict, and Investigate — for marine underwriters, brokers, and P&I clubs. By H1 2024 revenue was up 37% year-on-year, ACV (annual contract value) up 35%, and the company had 219 commercial customers paying an average ACV of $70,700. Commercial ACV made up 33% of total ACV, up from 32% a year earlier.

Named insurance customers. Gard is the world's largest P&I club — a mutual insurer that covers shipowners against liability. In May 2025 Gard extended its partnership with Windward for sanctions compliance, after about 18 months of working together. Generali is a long-running partner for maritime sanctions compliance and financial-crime controls; Livio Russo, Generali's Group Head of Financial Crime Compliance, publicly endorsed the platform on Windward's marine-insurance page. At IPO, Windward also named BP, Shell, HSBC, and 70+ global accounts across banks, commodity traders, insurers, and governments.

Why data-platform, not underwriting-workstation. Windward's core product is a data layer, not a place where underwriters write policies. It tracks vessels using AIS (the radio signals ships broadcast automatically), runs 15+ AI models to spot suspicious behaviour — ship-to-ship cargo transfers, GPS signal manipulation, unexplained gaps in tracking — maps vessel ownership networks, and checks ships against sanctions watchlists from LSEG World-Check and LexisNexis. The MAI Expert virtual agent, launched in 2024, adds a generative-AI layer that writes narrative risk assessments and drafts correspondence. Insurers, clubs, and banks plug Windward into their own underwriting, compliance, and claims workflows. It is a behavioural-risk data utility, not a policy-admin or workstation system, which puts it in the data-platform layer alongside Concirrus.

Windward vs Concirrus — the marine-analytics head-to-head. Both are London-adjacent, AI-native marine-analytics platforms that sell to specialty insurers. Concirrus is privately held and VC-backed (roughly $41M raised, from AlbionVC and CommerzVentures); Windward is publicly listed on AIM and publishes half-year ACV figures. Concirrus' Quest Marine focuses on statistical market models — a Marine Hull Market Model trained on 100K+ policies and claims — and targets hull and cargo pricing through the Lloyd's and London Market broker channel, with customers including Howden, SCOR, Arch, Codan Marine, TransRe, and a 2025 Lloyd's follow-syndicate partnership. Windward focuses on behavioural and compliance intelligence: sanctions screening, dark-fleet detection, critical infrastructure protection. It sells to a wider range of buyers — P&I clubs (Gard), primary insurers (Generali), banks (HSBC), energy companies (BP, Shell), and governments. A specialty marine carrier can run both at once — and several do: Concirrus for hull-pricing models and behavioural scoring at the point of quote, Windward for sanctions monitoring and dark-activity surveillance across the existing book. The sharpest overlap is in sanctions-aware underwriting, where both vendors sell behavioural-risk feeds to the same London marine desks. The difference is Windward's breadth outside insurance versus Concirrus' depth inside specialty insurance.

Recent product direction. In February 2025 Windward launched Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection, an AI product that monitors threats to undersea cables, pipelines, and rigs. The MAI Expert generative-AI agent and an expanded Dataminr partnership for real-time event alerting also came in 2024-2025. Together these moves push Windward from structured analytics toward workflows that generate narrative output for compliance officers and underwriters.