Kario reads charter party terms, port logs, and statements of fact to auto-calculate laytime, flag every claimable exception, and generate a court-ready demurrage claim — in 18 minutes.
A single voyage generates a 200-page charter party, handwritten statements of fact from port agents, NOR tenders via email, berth notes, and weather logs. None of it is structured. All of it is legally operative in a demurrage dispute.
WIBON, WIPON, SHINC, SHEX, FHINC — the same terms mean subtly different things depending on jurisdiction and custom. Shipowners and charterers each read the same clause to their own advantage. Both cite legal precedent. Both are right, partially.
The average manual calculation misses 3–7 claimable time exceptions per voyage. Each exception is worth $5K–$50K. Across a fleet, this is a systematic, invisible revenue leak that nobody has the tools to audit — until it's already lost.
Claims are filed weeks after discharge, by which point port agents have moved on, logs are incomplete, and counterparties know exactly how to exploit the delay. Speed is a legal advantage in demurrage — and most operators file dangerously slow.
Reads any charter party format — BIMCO, Shellvoy, Asbatankvoy, or fully bespoke — and extracts every operative laytime clause, its conditions, exceptions, and legal hierarchy. No templates, no manual tagging, no missed clauses buried in addenda.
A deterministic, auditable rule engine — not a large language model — applies extracted terms to port logs and SOFs. Every second of allowed, excepted, or demurrage time is traced back to a specific source document line. Defensible at LMAA arbitration.
An ML model trained on LMAA, SCMA, and AAA arbitration outcomes scores every contested time period before you file. Know exactly where your counterparty will push back, how strong their position is — and which disputes are worth taking to arbitration.
OCR and normalization of charter parties, SOFs, NOR tenders, and port logs from any format — PDF, scanned fax, emailed handwritten notes from port agents.
Fine-tuned LLM reads the CP and extracts every laytime clause, its conditions, and exception hierarchy — tolerating the ambiguity of real contract language.
Deterministic rule engine applies extracted terms to timestamped port events. Port-specific holiday calendar and local customs database applied automatically.
Dispute model scores each contested time period for arbitration probability. Every flag annotated with relevant case law and clause interpretation strength.
Auto-drafts a formal demurrage claim with full audit trail, source-traced calculation worksheet, and supporting exhibits. Ready to send. Ready to defend.
Kario uses a hybrid architecture: an LLM only for document parsing — where tolerance for contractual ambiguity and varied phrasing is essential — and a deterministic rule engine for calculation, where every second must be auditable to its source. This separation is the product. "The AI calculated it" is not a defensible answer in arbitration. A timestamped rule trace is.
Ops team spends 2–3 days manually extracting CP terms and rebuilding a laytime sheet in Excel. One analyst, one voyage, one spreadsheet that no one else can read.
3–7 claimable exceptions missed per voyage because port holiday calendars and local customs live in nobody's head and certainly not in any system.
Dispute discovered when the counterparty files a counter-claim weeks post-discharge. No time to rebuild the case from stale logs and unavailable port agents.
Two teams, two spreadsheets, no systematic way to find where the numbers diverge — just competing emails and protracted, expensive negotiation.
Kario reads the CP and SOF and returns a complete, source-traced laytime sheet in 18 minutes. One analyst now manages 10× the voyage volume with full audit trail.
Port exception database auto-applies local rules across 700+ ports. Every defensible minute is captured and cited to a specific source document line.
Dispute points scored at calculation time. Claim filed within days of discharge while evidence is fresh, logs are available, and port agents remember the voyage.
Counterparty diff engine pinpoints every disagreement to the hour, annotated with case law strength rating — shortening disputes from months to days.
Dry bulk, tanker, and breakbulk operators running 50–500 voyages per year. Every day's delay on a demurrage claim is a day's cash flow lost. They have the most to gain from faster, more complete recoveries — and the most to lose from slow, incomplete ones.
Trafigura, Vitol, Glencore, and Cargill move hundreds of voyages per month. They need to validate and contest owner claims at scale — one ops analyst cannot keep up. Highest contract value of any segment. Most resistant to status quo.
UK P&I, Gard, Steamship Mutual, and top maritime law firms in London, Singapore, and Houston handle hundreds of demurrage disputes annually. Kario offers white-label calculation infrastructure on a revenue-share basis — aligning incentives completely.
LMAA, SCMA, and AAA arbitration awards are public but entirely unstructured. Building a clean, queryable dataset of outcomes, clause interpretations, and contested time periods is a 12–18 month head start that grows more valuable with every voyage Kario processes. Competitors start from zero — and the model improves continuously from both sides of every dispute.
700+ active commercial ports globally — each with its own public holiday calendar, local port customs, historical berth congestion patterns, and conventional exceptions. No competitor has this compiled. It requires continuous maintenance from port agents and local maritime counsel around the world, and Kario enriches every single calculation with it automatically, without the operator lifting a finger.
When both owner and charterer use Kario, the dispute workflow is automated end-to-end: each side sees the same source-traced calculation and can challenge specific time periods with one click. Each dual-sided transaction improves dispute prediction accuracy for the entire network. Classic data flywheel — the more voyages, the better the model, the stronger the moat against any new entrant.
Once a trading house standardizes its bespoke charter party template parsing inside Kario, switching costs become enormous. Every internal workflow, every historical calculation, every settled dispute record lives in the platform. The more voyages processed, the harder it is to migrate — and the harder it is for any competitor to match the institutional knowledge embedded in a customer's Kario instance.
Legacy vessel management platforms from the early 2000s. Offer manual laytime templates and spreadsheet exports. No AI, no document parsing, no dispute intelligence. The "technology" is Microsoft Excel with a maritime skin — and a price tag to match.
Brokers and market data providers with deep fixture and rate data. They are not software companies and have no contract execution layer, no automation. Their data is valuable as an input to Kario — not competition for it.
Every major trading house has a bespoke laytime spreadsheet built by someone who left three years ago. Tribal knowledge. No audit trail. No exception database. No dispute prediction. The most common "competitor" — and the easiest to displace because the cost of staying is already enormous.
The only AI-native, document-first contract execution layer in maritime. Not a data provider, not a broker tool, not a spreadsheet upgrade — a new category entirely: maritime contract intelligence. First to own this position owns the workflow for the entire industry.
The person who loses sleep over demurrage is not a VP — it's the ops analyst processing 15 voyages a week. Land bottom-up through this persona. When one analyst saves 10 hours a week and recovers $200K in a missed claim, the platform sells itself upward.
Free voyage calculator. Acquire demurrage claims handlers at Greek, Singaporean, and Scandinavian operators. Every free voyage processed is training data for the dispute model and the port exception database.
Convert operators to paid voyage plans. Launch the dispute predictor product. Close the first trading house enterprise deal. Target one P&I club partnership for white-label distribution and bulk portfolio volume.
Counterparty network live — both sides of disputes on-platform. Expand into the full charter party lifecycle: fixture recap automation, performance claims, cargo quality disputes. The contract intelligence layer for all of maritime.
Kario exists because the maritime industry's most valuable workflows — laytime, demurrage, charter party disputes — have been completely untouched by modern software. The incumbents are ancient. The spreadsheets are tribal. And every day of delay costs someone six figures.
The opportunity isn't to digitize shipping — it's to build the contract intelligence layer the industry has never had: one that reads the documents operators actually use, applies the law as arbitrators actually interpret it, and produces claims that hold up when it counts most.
Kario gives demurrage teams the calculation infrastructure that's faster, more complete, and defensible under arbitration. Request a demo — we'll run a live calculation on your actual charter party.