Windward CEO Ami Daniel on Staying Relentlessly Product-Focused in Fast-Moving Maritime AI

Maritime trade presents a perfect storm of complexity. Around 80% of the world’s goods are transported by sea, which today means companies face a slew of new obstacles, from geopolitical conflicts to supply chain pressures and changing regulatory requirements, not to mention physical hazards.

Enter Windward, the leading maritime AI company built specifically to navigate such complexity. Windward’s proprietary AI-powered platform provides real-time information and insights for the maritime sector, allowing industry participants to better manage risk, compliance and critical business workflows.

The platform brings visibility to the world’s oceans through document validation, supply chain visibility and vessel identity management. In one Windward dashboard, users see real-time ship movements and risks in different geographies as containers move from port to port. Windward’s 290 clients include blue-chip companies across sectors, from energy to logistics to manufacturing. In addition, more than 80 government agencies rely on Windward each day.

FTV Capital invested in Windward earlier this year after spending nearly a decade tracking the company and developing a relationship with its ambitious CEO Ami Daniel. Our investment helped Windward establish a U.S. headquarters and return to private ownership after years trading on the London Stock Exchange. Ami, a former naval officer, launched the company in 2010 and has been charting his own course since age 15. “I think being an entrepreneur is more of an identity than a profession,” he says.

We spoke with Ami about staying ahead of the curve and keeping his team product-focused in the ever-evolving world of maritime AI.

You’ve been in this business a long time. What did maritime trade look like before Windward, and what would it look like without it?

Moving goods across the world is ancient, and complicated. The majority of goods you buy have been on a ship at some point.

Until Windward, the industry and the ocean itself were basically black boxes – from a regulatory perspective, from a cargo and vessel perspective, and down to the basic workflows. There was just massive information asymmetry. Coast Guards and Navy forces were chasing ghosts, and banks and insurance companies were in the dark about how to finance trades or judge the risk. Everyone was using 20^th century tools.

Without Windward, the maritime industry would stay in that pre-digital age while every other industry is moving ahead with data and AI. The fact that we have come so far is still, in my view, astonishing. What we do is very ambitious – accelerate global trade by bringing visibility to the oceans. It is a marathon, and it’s still early days.

What makes building software for the maritime industry so challenging?

There’s so much manual work and so many kinds of workflows across companies. If you were building software the traditional way, it would take a long time to codify and learn every one of these workflows. In my view, the biggest challenge and opportunity is: Can we think of software in a different way? Instead of forcing our customers into a repeatable case, instead of software-as-a-service, can we build service-as-software? AI changes a lot, and in this problem space AI agents work together to deliver the outcomes.

We are generally approaching things as problem first, not product first. We put aside our product and say: What’s your problem? Our playbook tells you how to look at a set of customer problems, then how to codify and “platformize” them on top of a unique data asset. This is what we are doing with maritime AI.

How do you decide when to build something custom versus adapting what already exists?

Here’s an analogy. I live in London now, and my house was built in 1800 or so. It didn’t come with an air conditioner. All of our houses have doors and knobs and windows, but they’re not exactly the same doors, knobs and windows. Some houses have similar components, but those components don’t all need to look alike; some houses are fine without air conditioning. That’s how I think about products today.

Everything we’ve built, platform-wise, is a building block. All of our customers need houses, but they can all look a bit different. I think once you start with that, you open up a lot of opportunity. You solve very valuable problems that are very unique to you. You do so building on our data asset, and then that is platformized and repeated. Thinking of requests this way has accelerated our growth tremendously. We have more than tripled our customer base over the past five years.

What drove your decision to take Windward private and partner with FTV on a transition to the U.S.?  

When I saw AI taking off in a particular way, I understood that it wasn’t possible to achieve what I wanted to achieve operating as a public company. AI is moving too fast, and going private opened up a much bigger growth opportunity.

We were also interested in growing in the U.S. market. In the past, we were limited to an extent when we wanted to work with the U.S. overnment. The American government buys more than the rest of the world combined in terms of defense. That is now an important source of our revenue, with 24 U.S. government agencies relying on Windward. The path was very clear.

FTV was my first choice because FTV isn’t a classic private equity firm – they’re growth-oriented investors that roll up their sleeves and provide resources that deliver real value. The team knows how to play across stages. It’s a very unique model and a perfect fit for our DNA and aspirations. FTV did a great job helping us bring in the right talent to build the American team and ramp up government sales. We just had our strongest quarter ever for U.S. government bookings, led by Chuck Cash, Windward’s new vice president of U.S. public sector sales.

What’s next on the roadmap for Windward?

We’re really leaning into product development. I think you lead with product over sales; sales are the outcome of a great product, not the other way around.

We recently rolled out a new product with image-based intelligence, enabling all our customers to access data from a comprehensive network of commercial satellite constellations around the world. Over the past four years, operational satellites surged from 3,370 in 2020 to 11,500 in 2024. We’ve created a way for our customers to seamlessly integrate and tap into any radio frequency, electrical, optical or synthetic actuator globally. It’s unique and essentially lets you go from the old way – manually inspecting static snapshots from satellites – to detecting and analyzing objects and activity anywhere on earth in real time.

We’re entering a very big market we were not playing in before.

You’ll also see us moving towards proprietary data and document analysis with AI. I see document analysis as a big driver in international trade, and the ability to analyze documents at scale is quite exciting.