Windward

Windward is a maritime-AI platform founded in 2010 in Tel Aviv by two former Israeli Navy officers, Ami Daniel and Matan Peled. The company listed on London's AIM under the ticker WNWD on 6 December 2021, placing 22.258 million shares at 155p for a £126.5m market capitalisation and raising roughly £26.3m of primary capital — the first Israeli technology float in the City in more than five years.

From defence intelligence to commercial insurance. Windward started as a naval-intelligence vendor, selling to the US Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the United Nations. Its commercial pivot into insurance, banking, and trading began in earnest with a $16.5M Series C in 2019 led by XL Innovate (AXA XL's insurtech fund), earmarked explicitly for marine-insurer expansion. The same year Windward shipped its Insurance Suite — Evaluate, Predict, and Investigate — aimed at marine underwriters, brokers, and P&I clubs. By H1 2024 the company reported revenue up 37% YoY, ACV up 35%, and 219 commercial customers at an average ACV of $70,700 — with commercial ACV representing 33% of total ACV, up from 32% a year earlier.

Named insurance customers. Gard — the world's largest P&I club — extended its partnership with Windward in May 2025 for sanctions compliance, after roughly 18 months of prior collaboration. Generali is a named long-running partner on maritime sanctions-compliance and financial-crime controls, with Livio Russo (Group Head of Financial Crime Compliance) publicly endorsing the platform on Windward's marine-insurance page. Broader customer disclosures at IPO included 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 maritime-intelligence data layer: AIS vessel tracking, 15+ proprietary AI models for illicit-activity detection (ship-to-ship transfers, GNSS manipulation, dark-activity gaps), ownership-network graphs, and sanctions watchlist integration via LSEG World-Check and LexisNexis. The MAI Expert virtual agent (launched 2024) layers generative AI on top to produce narrative risk assessments and draft correspondence. Insurers, clubs, and banks consume Windward inside their own underwriting, compliance, and claims workflows — it is a behavioural-risk data utility, not a policy-admin or workstation system, which places it cleanly 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 targeting specialty insurers. The differences are substantive. Concirrus is privately held and VC-backed (~$41M raised, AlbionVC/CommerzVentures); Windward is publicly listed on AIM with transparent half-year ACV disclosures. Concirrus' Quest Marine emphasises statistical market models (Marine Hull Market Model, 100K+ policy-and-claim training corpus) aimed at hull and cargo pricing and the Lloyd's/London Market broker channel — Howden, SCOR, Arch, Codan Marine, TransRe, and a 2025 Lloyd's follow-syndicate partnership. Windward's centre of gravity is behavioural and compliance intelligence — sanctions screening, dark-fleet detection, critical infrastructure protection — sold across a broader buyer universe that spans P&I clubs (Gard), primary insurers (Generali), banks (HSBC, trade-finance compliance), energy supermajors (BP, Shell), and governments. A specialty marine carrier can — and several do — run both: Concirrus for hull-rating market models and behavioural scoring at point of quote, Windward for sanctions/compliance monitoring and dark-activity surveillance across the bound book. The overlap tension is sharpest in sanctions-aware underwriting, where both vendors now pitch behavioural-risk feeds to the same London marine desks; the differentiator is Windward's breadth outside insurance (banks, commodity traders, defence) versus Concirrus' depth inside specialty insurance (Quest's submission-automation push with Lloyd's follow-syndicates).

Recent product direction. February 2025 saw the launch of Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection, an AI solution targeting undersea cables, pipelines, and rigs — a defence-and-resilience product adjacent to the insurance franchise. The MAI Expert generative-AI agent and an expanded Dataminr partnership (real-time event alerting) round out a 2024-2025 roadmap that is pushing Windward from structured analytics toward agentic, narrative-generating workflows for compliance officers and underwriters.