Offshore teams make high-cost decisions every day based on something they cannot control: the sea. A missed weather window can delay construction, leave vessels idle or make an operation unsafe. Yet these decisions were being made on gut instinct, with limited data to back them up.
In July 2025, Insurtech Gateway co-led NeuWave’s £570k round alongside QVentures. At the time, the team described what they were building as “Google Maps for the ocean”.
A year later, the proposition has become much clearer.
“We found that the reason people are willing to convert to us from companies they’ve worked with for decades is that we provide incredible clarity at sea,” says Jana Stella, CEO and Co-Founder of NeuWave. “Instead of individual experience being the driver of decisions, we can now back decisions with high-resolution environmental intelligence.”
Customers expanded the use case
NeuWave began by focusing on helping operators understand when conditions would allow people to move safely to and from offshore assets.
“We originally built NeuWave to work on crew transfer,” Jana explains. “What we found was that developers and port authorities wanted to use it for their entire operations.”
That has opened applications across subsea operations, cable installation, geotechnical surveys and heavy lifts.
“We thought it would take a lot more training and planning to build a larger product stack. But customers were really happy to use it straight away.”
NeuWave has also expanded beyond its original offshore wind focus into ports, with five now trialling the software.
“You go from trying to predict what customers want to actually understanding what they need,” she says. “You’re getting live feedback.”
Proving the value
During a trial with CMA CGM and Liverpool Port, a storm gave NeuWave the opportunity to compare its modelling with standard forecasts used to support vessel movements around Liverpool.
According to NeuWave, its modelling — which combines high-resolution environmental modelling with more than 30 years of hindcast data, forecasting and real-time intelligence across factors including wave behaviour, tidal cycles and wind patterns — reduced false weather windows by 33%. The company estimates that this equated to approximately £1.8 million in avoided demurrage and port operation charges during the period.
The reason NeuWave can have such a big commercial impact is granularity.
“You don’t just get a view of what happens at one site or over the region,” Jana says. “You get a detailed view of every single possible location that you could visit in Liverpool Bay.”
Offshore construction and maintenance increasingly extend beyond the traditional March-to-October operating season. In those shoulder months, small differences in a workable weather window can determine whether an operation goes ahead.
“We can model when those conditions teeter between acceptable and marginal,” Jana explains. “Those sort of one-hour or two-hour windows can mean a lot when you’re working offshore.”
Finding the insurance use case
NeuWave is working with risk intelligence companies to apply its precision metocean data to marine risk models. Its conversations with underwriters are also helping the team sharpen where that data can make the most practical difference.
“Underwriters want to make smarter decisions, and make them quickly, on projects that are increasingly outside their regular scope,” says Jana. “They need a clear green, yellow or red view, and we can give them that based on our operational and oceanographic knowledge.”
More construction in new regions, alongside activity extending into winter, means more projects require additional risk engineering, slowing responses to prospective clients. In a competitive market, being able to assess a project quickly matters. So does understanding whether it resembles risks the underwriter has successfully written before.
NeuWave is developing RISKmatch, an interactive atlas for construction and asset damage risks across wind farms, fish farms, subsea cables and other assets. It can flag environmental conditions of concern and show comparable areas around the world. The aim is to help underwriters identify what needs closer review and make faster decisions.
The tool’s workflow and design are being refined with feedback from Verisk and underwriters across Europe and the Americas.
Finding who pays
NeuWave has also learnt where not to focus.
Some vessel operators valued the technology but were not willing to pay enough to make them attractive customers. The reason, Jana discovered, came down to incentives.
“Sometimes it’s not commercially viable for them to have a good forecast because they’re getting paid by the day anyway,” she explains.
Developers and ports are different because they are more likely to carry the financial consequences of delays. That is now showing up in NeuWave’s commercial conversations.
“Now we’ve met quite a few developers and ports, almost every conversation I’ve had has resulted in interest for a trial, starting a trial or wanting to go into a sale.”
New markets, different risks
NeuWave’s expansion is increasingly taking it outside Europe, with interest across the Middle East and APAC.
“In the Middle East, a lot of the time the conditions are absolutely fine to work in,” Jana explains. “But there is always this looming worry of a big storm that they wouldn’t be able to foresee, and that would just cease all operations.”
That contrasts with the North Sea, where severe conditions are more routine and operators plan proactively around them.
NeuWave is also beginning to see interest in South Korea, Singapore and Southeast Asia, where Jana believes weaker local wave knowledge could create an opportunity for the company.
“The big opportunities for us lie in areas where we have very little competition and the wave knowledge currently is really poor,” she says. “That’s where we can really showcase what we’re doing and find our flagships for our next phase of growth. Just beginning to tap into this market feels like the start of a huge acceleration for us.”
From data to infrastructure
NeuWave is starting to turn environmental intelligence into part of the operational infrastructure behind offshore projects: informing when vessels move, where operations happen and how teams respond to volatile conditions.
Insurance could become a second market for that same intelligence. The opportunity is still being tested, but the logic is compelling: if better environmental data can help an operator understand what is happening offshore, it could also help an insurer better understand the risk surrounding those operations.
Meet NeuWave at Lloyd’s
Jana will be speaking at Insurtech Gateway’s Climate Evening at Lloyd’s Old Library on 11 November, sharing more about NeuWave’s progress and how environmental intelligence could support better-informed underwriting and claims decisions for offshore projects. Register here.