OpenTug Expands, Adds New Features

It’s been just over five years since OpenTug was founded in 2019, and so far, the company has no direct competitors. The software company focuses on maximizing efficiencies of barge movements on the inland waterways and was recently valued at about $10 million. Last February, it raised $3.15 million to expand sales and marketing networks.

“We’ve been making tremendous progress” in signing up companies and gaining new business, CEO Jason Aristides said in a recent interview with The Waterways Journal. The company puts GPS devices on barges to detect and avoid potential collisions and uses their data together with artificial intelligence to locate barges on OpenTug’s increasingly populated databases.

“We use AI to look at whole fleets, and to pick the right barges to move. We include information about locks, water levels in the various waterways, etc.,” Aristides said.

A recently introduced feature in the OpenTug software streamlines the ordering of bargeloads of cargo, Aristides said.
OpenTug’s software also pulls in data from emails, instantly integrating that information into its database. It also “geo-fences” 30,000 ports.

“The point is to reduce the distance that empty barges have to move,” Aristides said.

Open Tug’s accurate tracking of barge movement histories can potentially save companies many millions of dollars on insurance costs alone, he said.
Reducing the miles that empty barges move has obvious green benefits by reducing emissions, as well.

“Sexy new technologies like turning ammonia into hydrogen get a lot of attention, but moving your vessels more efficiently to reduce unnecessary emissions has more impact in the long run on reducing emissions,” he said. “It also means that shippers don’t have to pay for empty legs.”

Automated Quoting

OpenTug has shifted its focus a bit since its founding, Aristides said. He got his initial inspiration when observing a fleet on the West Coast and seeing how many empty barges were being shifted around.

OpenTug now offers two packages. BargeOS focuses on tracking barges, while the other package focuses on generating accurate quotes for an entire voyage. Accurate quotes for project cargoes can be generated in just a few hours.

“We are working with liquid cargo and petroleum carriers to develop a quoting protocol for liquid cargoes,” Aristides said.

He estimates the software enables a 300 percent increase in efficiency in generating quotes.