When you think “crowdsourced navigation,” you probably picture rush-hour traffic on city highways, not container ships slicing through the Indian Ocean. But that’s about to change. Orca AI, the autonomous maritime navigation startup, has unveiled Co-Captain—a new platform feature being dubbed the world’s first “Waze of the Seas.”
The system connects more than 1,000 vessels equipped with Orca AI’s vision-based navigation tech, allowing ships to share real-time data about hazards, weather, interference, and environmental conditions. The result: ships that “see” and respond to their environment collaboratively, turning ocean traffic into a smart, self-learning network.
Turning Ships Into Sensors
Shipping is the lifeblood of global trade—handling 90% of international goods—but it’s also becoming riskier. Maritime incidents rose 42% between 2018 and 2024, reaching 3,310 recorded cases worldwide. Orca AI’s bet is that data, not just better design, is the key to reversing that trend.
Each Orca AI-equipped ship acts as a node in a global network, detecting risks from small craft and fishing nets to GPS spoofing, piracy threats, and severe weather. When one vessel encounters trouble, others nearby receive verified alerts tailored to their route and conditions. It’s the kind of collective awareness maritime crews have dreamed about since radar first went digital.
“Collaborative navigation at sea is no longer optional—it’s a safety, environmental, and security imperative,” says Yarden Gross, Orca AI’s CEO and co-founder. “Each vessel becomes a key link in a living safety chain.”
Real-Time Alerts: From Pirates to Whales
Co-Captain’s alert categories read like a global captain’s checklist. Ships receive route-specific notifications about:
- Congested waters: Early warnings of dense traffic or recent near misses.
- Severe weather: Beaufort scale readings and live visibility data.
- GNSS interference: Instant alerts on spoofing or jamming events, plus rerouting advice.
- Piracy zones: Prompts to activate security protocols before entering high-risk areas.
- Environmental compliance: Whale sightings, emission-control updates, and speed limits.
- Navigational hazards: Reports on buoys, ice, or debris, plus man-overboard or pollution events.
All data is fully anonymized, sharing only essential details like coordinates and observed conditions. Privacy isn’t just a promise—it’s a regulatory necessity in a world where shipping logs are sensitive commercial intelligence.
Data Depth Meets Predictive Power
The platform already draws on over 100 million nautical miles of data, refining its machine-learning models with each voyage. This depth of data fuels what Orca AI calls a “continuously evolving ecosystem”—one that helps ships not only detect risk but anticipate it.
“Having passed the milestone of 1,000 vessels, this could very well be the most accurate crowdsourced navigational engine in shipping history,” Gross says. And with hundreds more ships set to join, the system’s predictive capacity will only grow.
A New Era for Maritime Safety Tech
The launch of Co-Captain puts Orca AI in a unique position in the maritime autonomy race. While companies like Sea Machines, Windward, and Kongsberg have focused on automation and situational awareness, Orca AI’s “network effect” approach gives it something of a social edge—think LinkedIn for ships, but with radar vision and real-time storm alerts.
As global regulators tighten safety, emissions, and transparency standards, ship operators are under pressure to modernize their fleets. A connected ocean, where ships feed data back into a shared AI brain, may be the next logical step.
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