VAKT’s 2024 Prepared the Ground for Significant Expansion
It’s been a year since VAKT appointed Tasja Botha as CEO and so recently, I contacted her to find out how she felt that year had gone and what we might expect from VAKT in the coming year. “Looking back, it was an active and busy year, and we successfully doubled down on getting users signed up on the barges side,” she told me. “We also signed four inspectors who are now up and running and pushing data through the platform.”
Other highlights included Shell going live with vSure, as well as preparing the ground for VAKTs expansion into vessels via successful proof of concepts with customers. “We did a huge PoC to see if we could handle vessels. Not only did we discover that we could, but we discovered that very little incremental development work was needed to do it.”
Of course, CEOs are also measured on financial performance and there VAKT increased revenues by 115%, she said. 2025 is about VAKTs push into vessels and looking to north America.
It seems that VAKT did quite a lot of work looking at handling vessels on its platform and that included a proof of concept in Asia – with local customers looking at vessels and barges. However, the proof-of-concept work also included one on the logistics side, which was also successful and as a result, should see the results going live in mid-2025.
Tasja is proud of the VAKT team as the company met all the goals it had set last year. Increasing revenues, signing and getting new users up on its platforms including Shell, as well as reducing VAKTs cost structure, she told me.
She is particularly pleased with the work the team did on AI functionality – “This functionality will really enhance the user experience,” she said. Essentially it means that users can stay on the vLogistics platform even if the counterparty isn’t on it – so that users can communicate to non-users on the platform via the AI tool. It is also developing and using AI on the vSure platform.
“All in all, I am happy with our achievements and that our platform delivery is stable for our users.” She is looking to vessels handling as the next big progress marker for VAKT, rolling it out to current customers and into different customer areas. 2025 is going to be a big year for VAKT.
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