In development
The sea is full of false skins.
Selkie is maritime identity intelligence. It detects vessels hiding who they are, and watches the ones that linger over the cables, pipelines and interconnectors Europe runs on.
In the old stories of the northern isles, a selkie puts on a seal's skin and passes unseen through the water. The skin always comes off. What is underneath is the truth.
We named the company after the disguise, because the disguise is the problem.
A fleet built to be unseen
Hundreds of tankers now move sanctioned cargo behind switched-off transponders, spoofed positions, borrowed names and fast-changing flags. The same waters carry infrastructure nobody can replace quickly: power interconnectors, gas pipelines, and the fibre that carries most of the world's data and financial traffic.
Since 2022, anchors have kept finding it. Nord Stream. Balticconnector. The Baltic power and data cables cut through the winter of 2024–25. Navies now patrol. Operators still cannot tell, of the hundred ships that pass over an asset in a week, which one is lying about itself.
That gap — between a ship is nearby and this ship is not what it claims — is where the damage happens.
What Selkie does
- Deception, scored.
- Dark gaps, spoofed tracks, impossible kinematics, name and flag churn, ship-to-ship transfer patterns — fused into a per-vessel deception score with the reasons attached, not a black-box flag.
- Corridor alerts.
- Load your cables, pipelines and export routes. Selkie alerts on loitering, slow passes, anchor-drag signatures and repeated dark transits, ranked by the vessel's deception score — so one alert means something.
- Evidence packs.
- Time-stamped, source-linked reconstructions of an incident or a pattern of behaviour, built to hand to a regulator, an insurer or an ally without a caveat sheet.
How it works
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Feeds.
Satellite and terrestrial AIS, SAR imagery, RF anomalies, registries and port calls.
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Fusion.
Tracks stitched across identity changes: one vessel, however many names it has worn.
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Judgement.
Behaviour models score deception, with the evidence retained.
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Action.
Corridor alerts and evidence packs, delivered where operators already work.
Most of this data is public. The judgement isn't.
Who it's for
- Infrastructure operators.
- Cable systems, pipelines, interconnectors, offshore wind — know which of this week's passing ships deserved a second look.
- Governments and navies.
- A shared, sourced picture of deceptive behaviour in national waters, fit for allied reporting.
- Insurers and P&I clubs.
- Identity risk on a hull before it becomes a claim.
Where this is
Selkie is a single-founder company at pre-seed stage.
Selkie is in development in Scotland. The detection engine is being built against public incident data first; pilot conversations follow. If you operate infrastructure under these waters, or you back the people defending it, ask for the briefing.
Request the briefing
A short deck: the problem, the wedge, the plan, and what a first pilot looks like.