Maritime Ventures sat down with Enrico Giancaterina, CEO of BluComply, the venture builder's second spin-off, on freeing maritime SMEs from compliance overhead.
What was your path before joining BluComply?
My entrepreneurial journey in the startup world began in 2013, when the term itself was barely known in Italy. After an initial experience as a business plan analyst in a venture capital fund, I decided to leave everything behind and start working as a CFO in a company undergoing an acceleration program. In the following years, I co-founded startups in the social gaming sector, raising funds and taking on various roles until eventually becoming managing director. After the exit, I focused on developing new businesses in blockchain, cloud computing, and AI, following a process very similar to venture building. The common thread across all these experiences has been using technology to reduce costs and generate new revenue streams, and that is exactly what we aim to do with BluComply.
What convinced you to become entrepreneur-in-residence and CEO of BluComply?
It was almost a natural step given my previous experiences. I was particularly drawn to the idea of working within a company built through a structured venture building process, created to solve a real problem. Building new technologies and solutions in close contact with the people who will actually use them is incredibly valuable, because it allows you to tackle challenges in a much more concrete and objective way, unlike founders who fall in love with their idea to the point of overlooking potential weaknesses. In this sense, Maritime Ventures is a pioneering project, I would say unique on the international market, both for the quality of the initiatives underway and for the rigorous selection of ideas at the outset.
What are your goals for the coming months?
We have some very challenging months ahead, during which we will need to finalize BluComply's fundraising to finance the first pilot projects with a number of already selected clients. The ultimate goal is to develop an automated solution to optimize compliance processes for SMEs operating in the maritime sector, which often struggle with excessive bureaucracy and regulation. We will do this by leveraging a technology, AI, that is capable of changing not only the rules of the digital market, but the rules of every sector, even the least visible ones. It will be a silent automation, invisible to the general public, but one that will enable companies to achieve significant cost savings. Our long-term objective is to reduce error rates in processes by 95% and automate more than 90% of back-office operations.
What are the advantages of being an entrepreneur-in-residence compared to a more traditional founder role?
Founders who start companies right after university or their studies often face major difficulties, because they lack knowledge of business processes and an effective method for building a company “from zero to one.” Above all, they lack the contacts and the right information to identify the real problems that companies, the potential users of their service, face every day. In this sense, a venture builder is a powerful tool for connecting corporates, technologies, and the people capable of using them. I believe AI will revolutionize a huge number of industrial activities, and this kind of flexibility and execution speed is essential to keep pace with change.
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