How Azimut.ai Is Building the Digital Identity Layer for Every Ship

ASHDOD, ISRAEL / ACCESS Newswire / May 18, 2026 / Every day, hundreds of thousands of vessels move through the world's oceans, straits, and port approaches. They carry cargo, fuel, passengers and, sometimes, things that nobody declared. The global maritime system has a visibility problem. Ships self-report their identities through AIS transponders, a system designed to prevent collisions, not to verify who is out there and what they are doing at sea. Satellite imagery offers a snapshot, often minimally, and certainly not a story.

And the cameras mounted at ports and coastal installations?

Until now, they watched but did not understand. Azimut.ai was founded to change that. Having started with a pilot camera system at the Port of Ashdod, they are now building toward a global digital identity database for every commercial vessel on earth, and it is one of the more ambitious technology narratives in Israeli maritime innovation today.

What's Going On In the Sea

The founding team of Azimut.ai came from the Israeli Navy and state security apparatus. They understood maritime patrol from the inside: what it means to try to track vessels in open water, what happens when you cannot trust what a ship says it is, and how many gaps exist in even the most sophisticated national maritime surveillance systems. When they began building Albatross, their initial frame of reference was naval defense: detecting threats, identifying suspicious vessel activity, and providing situational awareness in contested waters. Ports were not part of the original vision but that changed when they ran their first pilot at the Port of Ashdod.

Where the Proof Was Made

"The pilot at the Port of Ashdod was a game changer," recalls Matan Saat, CEO of Azimut.ai. "Ashdod was the first that opened the doors and gave us the base. They gave us the opportunity to prove our system." At the foundation of everything Azimut.ai builds is Albatross, a computer vision system that turns existing port cameras into a real-time maritime intelligence layer. It does not require new hardware but rather connects to cameras that are already installed, learns what normal looks like in a specific maritime environment, and then begins doing something that no traditional maritime system does well: it watches.

What makes this significant is what Albatross can do that AIS cannot. AIS is self-reported and a vessel can turn off its transponder, misrepresent its identity, or simply not be registered. Albatross identifies vessels by what they physically look like through features like hull shape, movement pattern, visual signature, independently of what they declare. Saat describes it as "the Face ID of ships: like how you go to an airport and you use face ID to check into a flight or pass through customs, our platform can recognize the same vessel in other places, from video, across different cameras and locations and create a unique ID for that ship over time."

Following the successful POC, the Port of Ashdod invested $650,000 in Azimut.ai, a decision that Shaul Schneider, Executive Chairman of the Board of Ashdod Port, described as a reflection of the port's belief that the Albatross system represented " a new dimension to understanding the maritime domain that gives operators the ability to see beyond traditional systems, anticipate risks, and act faster." Moreover, working with Ashdod Port was a strong signal for other organizations as well. Adi Gal, Chief Revenue Officer of Azimut.ai adds that "following the pilot, we launched new projects across Israel, from offshore gas platforms and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority to defense entities." Beyond Israel, the pilot also positioned the solution as a major asset that can be adopted by stakeholders globally, and the team is already receiving interest from the industry worldwide.

For Azimut.ai, the Ashdod collaboration gave the company an operational language and a shared vocabulary of port realities, maritime security challenges, and practical implementation demands that now resonates with every subsequent customer conversation. "For example, Ashdod asked us to check for swimmers, essentially unauthorized subjects in the water near the port," mentions Saat, "it was a different threat scenario than what we thought about from the beginning." The Port's request opened something larger, and its environment turned out to be the ideal proving ground for the detection technology, and for what would eventually become the company's most ambitious concept: a permanent, visual, behavioral identity for every vessel that moves through a port.

Fleetbook: The North Star

"Fleetbook" is where the company's ambition becomes genuinely novel. The concept is straightforward in its logic and vast in its implications. As mentioned before, today there is no comprehensive, visual, behavioral record of the world's commercial vessels. AIS gives you a name and a position, while satellite imagery gives you a moment in time. Nobody has built a system that gives you a persistent, verified, visual identity for a ship, who it is, where it has been, how it behaves, what anomalies it has triggered, across every port and maritime environment it has passed through. That is where the idea for "Fleetbook" was born.

It is meant to be a digital identity record for every commercial vessel on earth, built from visual data, updated continuously, and accessible to the organizations that need it most. Think of it as the maritime equivalent of a digital passport, except that unlike a passport, it cannot be faked by turning off a transponder. The architecture to support this is already in motion. Azimut.ai is working toward placing cameras in ports across every continent, contributing visual data to the Fleetbook database. They are in advanced discussions around potential integrations with a network spanning over 500 ports worldwide. Similarly, large maritime intelligence companies, which already monitor maritime intelligence from AIS and satellite data, are in active discussions with Azimut.ai about integration, recognizing that visual verification is the missing layer in their own data stack.

"Five years from now," says Saat, "every commercial vessel, including fishing vessels, will have a digital identity. One click and you get the complete history of that ship. We want to be the database and the instrument that makes real maritime enforcement possible." The customer base for Fleetbook is broad: government agencies and coast guards who need verified vessel tracking, enforcement organizations managing illicit trade and illegal fishing, banks and insurance companies that need to assess vessel risk, and port operators who need persistent identity data to manage traffic, safety, and compliance.

The Bigger Picture

Azimut.ai sits at the intersection of two trends that are converging fast. The first is the growing recognition that today's maritime borders are functionally open that the global system of vessel self-reporting is insufficient for the security, environmental, and commercial demands now being placed on it. The second is the maturation of computer vision and edge AI to the point where persistent, scalable, cost-effective visual monitoring is now achievable at port and coastal scale. The company's trajectory reflects both. It started with a camera system in an Israeli port. It is now deploying across multiple sites in Israel including offshore gas platforms, national parks, defense installations and building toward a global network that could redefine how the world tracks, verifies, and enforces behavior at sea. What comes next, if the Fleetbook vision is realized, is something the maritime world has never had: a complete, visual, tamper-proof record of who is actually out there.

About Ashdod Port

The Port of Ashdod is Israel's largest seaport and a key gateway for global trade, handling millions of tons of cargo annually across containers, bulk, general cargo, vehicles, and energy products. Its mission is to bridge global stakeholders with practical, field-tested technologies and create cross-border collaborations that accelerate operational and commercial outcomes.

CONTACT:

Igal Ben Zikri
igalB3@ashdodport.co.il

SOURCE: Ashdod Port