The global shipping industry underpins international trade, but it's also increasingly exploited to evade sanctions, launder money, and move illegal cargo. Shadow fleets use deceptive and covert tactics to conceal their true movements, letting them break international law. Financial institutions, regulators, and investigators are left without the tools to connect the dots, enabling sanctions evasion and making life at sea that much more dangerous.

Popeye is a maritime intelligence dashboard that detects and maps shadow fleet vessels by analyzing shipping behaviour. It processes vessel movement data, flags anomalies, and clusters suspicious ships into networks, giving analysts a clear, actionable picture of illicit activity.

Features

• Shadow fleet identification
  • Trajectory-based Variational Autoencoder encodes sequences of vessel location, speed, course, and timestamp data into a compressed latent space, using reconstruction error to score how far a vessel's movements deviate from normal behaviour
  • Analyzes vessel age, MMSI and AIS transmission gaps, flagging older or supposedly decommissioned ships and suspicious dark periods
  • Examines flagged vessel's registered flag state and insurance provider with AI agents, identifying flags of convenience and cross-referencing known risk indicators to assess the legitimacy of the vessel's ownership and coverage
• Fleet cluster visualization
  • Displays real-time vessel positions on a global map, allowing analysts to explore the current locations of tracked ships and drill into individual vessels for detailed information
• Predictive heatmap
  • Generates a heatmap of probable current locations for shadow fleet ships based on last known positions, helping analysts anticipate where they are likely operating