The Spanish company will use the investment to further scale its offering of automated wind-assisted propulsion systems for shipowners and shipping companies seeking to reduce fuel costs and polluting emissions.
Katapult Ocean, the Nordic impact investor, has co-led a $44m (€37.8m) funding round with Singapore-based impact investment firm OCTAVE Capital into bound4blue, a Spanish cleantech engineering company developing automated wind-assisted propulsion systems for shipowners and shipping companies who want to reduce fuel costs and polluting emissions.
Several new investors also participated in the round, including Motion Ventures, Odfjell family office and ReOcean Fund, led by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and Monaco Asset Management. Existing investors Shift4Good, GTT Strategic Ventures, KAI Capital and CDTI (Innvierte SICC) also made commitments to the company. The value of individual investments was not disclosed.
The investment will be used to accelerate bound4blue’s shift into full industrialisation of suction sails, which convert wind into usable thrust that replaces part of a ship’s engine power, cutting fuel use and carbon costs. The funding will also be used to support efforts to deepen R&D as the company looks to grow beyond existing commercial offerings and to respond to increased market demand by expanding manufacturing capacity of suction sails.
Speaking to Impact Investor, Anthony Bellafiore, investment manager at Katapult Ocean, said his firm’s investment would be made through the $50m Katapult Ocean Deep Blue Fund.
OCTAVE Capital is affiliated with the maritime sector through the IMC Industrial Group, a maritime and industrial solutions provider. Both companies are part of purpose-led family business TPC (Tsao Pao Chee).
Earlier this year, Impact Investor reported on the launch of the $75m (€64.4m) Asia Ocean Fund, a joint venture between Katapult and OCTAVE Capital.
Fuel and emissions savings
Bound4blue says suction sails are emerging as the leading pathway for immediate, scalable decarbonisation across the global fleet with commercial gains.
By 2027, the company expects to deliver annual CO₂ savings of more than 400,000 tonnes, with over 570,000 tonnes avoided in total between 2024 and 2027 – the equivalent of removing around 87,000 passenger cars from the road each year, planting more than 18 million trees, or avoiding over 250,000 transatlantic flights, it says.
This will be done through parallel production lines in Spain and China, to enable higher production throughput, stronger supply-chain resilience and faster delivery schedules.
Bellafiore said that over the long term although Katapult Ocean expects a portfolio of alternative fuels to power green shipping’s future, wind propulsion is currently the most commercially ready efficiency lever that shipowners can deploy at scale.
“On vessels where solutions are already installed, we have data showing consistent fuel and CO₂ reductions, with some voyage-leg savings hitting upwards of 40% or more, so the same hardware that cuts emissions also lowers the cost per vessel, per voyage. [This is] a rare alignment of climate impact and operating economics that we believe will drive rapid adoption,” he said.
Investment opportunity
Bound4blue says the maritime industry is entering a “retrofit decade”, in which tens of thousands of vessels will require efficiency upgrades before 2030. It said that unlike other efficiency solutions such as alternative fuels, which face long timelines for global availability and require engine compatibility and bunkering infrastructure to supply fuel to ships, suction sails can be installed and operated by shipping crews without delay.
The company has installed its technology on seven vessels to date, with a further twelve ships in the orderbook – representing more than fifty sails in total. These projects span large shipowners such as Maersk Tankers, Eastern Pacific Shipping, Odfjell, Klaveness Combination Carriers and BW Epic Kosan.
Its wind-assisted propulsion systems are also increasingly being incorporated into newbuild designs, which offers an opportunity for bound4blue to support, what it says is, a growing number of newbuild projects integrating wind propulsion from the outset.
“bound4blue has their eSAILs operating on a number of vessels, and across the wind propulsion industry, there are many companies which have been in the water with their solutions for some time,” said Bellafiore, explaining that to scale across the wider fleet two things are needed: continued regulatory and carbon-pricing clarity that rewards efficiency, and standardised retrofit and newbuild packages that make it easy for yards and operators to integrate wind systems at scale, which he said is something which bound4blue aims to use part of the capital in this round to facilitate.
“For investors, and particularly impact investors, we think the opportunity to back technology that is already generating revenues and audited CO₂ savings today, while being positioned to grow as thousands of vessels seek proven efficiency upgrades this decade, speaks for itself,” he added.
