Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many of those customers do you have? Is that a much larger customer base?

Demitri Memos: In total, we have just over 4,000 paying customers.

Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of SMBs that need to track and that includes all kinds of smaller operators.

Demitri Memos: There is also service providers who use our service for lead generation.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a sense of what is the TAM for your service? If you were to scale this over the next five years, how big can this get?

Demitri Memos: It’s very difficult to say. There are no official numbers of course. Generally, the shipping industry is very old. You don’t get much information.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure you have a list of target customers. Depending on their size, if you were to sell to that whole prospect list, how big could you get?

Demitri Memos: Let me tell you a bit about the technology that we’re using to track the ships. All commercial vessels and passenger vessels are required to broadcast their position and some other details through radio signals for navigational safety. What we have done is we’ve built a network of receiver antennas and installed these antennas around the coastland around the world.

We’re getting the data directly from the shores and sending these back to our service through the Internet, which are then processed and delivered to the website. This is called AIS. The AIS market is around $130 million, but it is relatively new technology. Applications are pretty limited in this space. We are actually creating the space and generating awareness about the possibilities and moving far beyond the shipping industry.

For example, the logistics industry has a very large potential. Regarding our company, I believe that in the next couple of years, we will be over $10 million in ARR. If all goes well, I believe that we can reach something like $50 million in the next five years, but I don’t know what happens beyond that.

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing this all self-financed at this point right?

Demitri Memos: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: From the notes that I was provided, you’re at over $5 million. Do you want to provide any other  guidance on what you’re doing in terms of annual revenue right now?

Demitri Memos: For the past four years now, we’ve been growing at 60% a year. This year, we’re going to do around $6.5 million depending on the state of the world by then. We’ve had a lot of discussions with VCs. There is interest and they’re calling us up but on the one hand, we’re profitable and we’re pretty healthy. We do have some cash to invest. On the other hand, to be very honest with you, I wouldn’t be very confident that I can actually manage $10 million wisely .

This segment is part 5 in the series : Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos
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