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Yep. Every oil trader and company is monitoring trade routes for insights. It’s almost a rite of passage for new analysts and interns to start playing with vessel data to look for new patterns.

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hi, I'm Kpler CTO. Indeed the space is crowded. To succeed you not only need strong algorithm on top of AIS data (ML, Operational research) but also lots of hard facts coming from partners in the supply chains (brokers, ship agents, ports authorities) that you need to extract with NLP and other strategies. Having a strong team of analysts with expertise in each commodity market is needed to interpret and complement the automation. Last piece is also to have a strategy not only to cover shipping transportation, but also storage, production, consumption of the commodities, so you can deduce more interesting intel. We for example use satellites and drones images as well to know the crude oil inventories onshore.

I come from that side (analyst) and am more of an enthusiast on the technical side- so I have always watched Kpler and some of the other newcomers with a lot of interest as you seem to be pushing the envelope compared with a lot of the more traditional commodity research houses which have been doing this for more years (the likes of Eikon, etc).

Curious, there seems to be a 'center of gravity' in new upstarts in the space in France- why is this?

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