AI for Tanker Chartering
It's the limit of how much email one person can carry. UpaRate reads your desk's shared mailbox, files every message and document into your own SharePoint, drafts the routine replies, and tracks what counterparties owe you — so the ceiling moves back to judgment, where it belongs.
Nothing sends without a person. Autonomy is earned one workflow at a time, and your managers hold the dial.
The Problem
The recap lands at 19:40 and gets re-keyed by hand into a folder structure someone invented four years ago. The agent's update has to reach Charterers, so it is forwarded with three words on top. Owners have gone quiet on the Q88 and nobody is sure whether it was chased on Tuesday or only discussed. A laycan sits in a thread rather than anywhere it can be counted on.
None of that requires a chartering brain. It requires attention, all day, without dropping any of it — and attention is the thing that runs out first. So the desk hires for volume rather than judgment, and a good operator spends their afternoon being a relay.
UpaRate takes the relaying. Your operators keep the deciding.
What UpaRate Does
Three jobs, running on every voyage your desk carries, from the recap to the final SOF.
Recaps, voyage orders, freight invoices, B/Ls, SOFs, noon reports, PIC updates, LOI correspondence. UpaRate classifies every message that lands in the shared mailbox, ties it to the right voyage, and drafts the routine replies and relays for an operator to approve.
Emails and attachments land in your SharePoint, in your per-fixture folder scheme — not a vendor silo. The folder map is configured per desk, and UpaRate learns from how your operators actually file, so the structure stays yours.
A running Waiting On list of everything counterparties owe your desk — and drafts the chaser when they go quiet. Deadlines are picked out of desk shorthand, and cleared when the confirming inbound arrives.
How It Works
UpaRate connects to your desk's Microsoft 365 shared mailbox through Microsoft Graph, with delegated permissions only — it reaches exactly what the signed-in operator reaches, and sends only as them, only once they have approved it.
A recap, voyage orders, an SOF, a noon report lands in the shared mailbox. UpaRate classifies it and ties it to the right voyage.
Documents file into your SharePoint, deadlines land on the tracker, and routine replies are drafted — as drafts, nothing more.
Every draft waits in the dashboard for a person. Approve as-is, edit, or reject — edits teach the engine your desk's way of saying it.
Nothing sends without a person — until your manager decides a specific workflow has proven itself and promotes it on the autonomy dial.
The Dial
Every draft waits for a person — including the ones the engine is certain about. A workflow only moves when your desk has watched it and a manager decides it has earned the move.
There is no switch that hands us your desk. There is a dial, it starts at zero, and it is not ours to turn.
Where every desk begins. Drafts are written and queued; not one of them leaves without an operator pressing approve.
A single kind of message — say, acknowledging an agent's update — after your desk has seen it handled correctly enough times to stop reading them.
One click, any time, by a manager. Promotion is a decision you can take back — which is the only reason it is safe to make.
UpaRate is developed hand-in-hand with a senior tanker operator running real voyages. The classifier, the folder learning, the Waiting On tracker, the chasers — all of it is shaped by live traffic on a working desk, not by a theoretical workflow drawn on a whiteboard.
We're deliberately early and deliberately small: access is invite-only while we onboard our first desks, and we don't ship features our operator wouldn't recognise.
Security
Single sign-on with your Microsoft account — we never hold passwords. Seats are limited per company, and new users need a manager's approval.
UpaRate never requests tenant-wide application access to your mail. It acts only through a signed-in operator's delegated permissions — reaching exactly the mailboxes that person already reaches, and sending only as them, only after they approve.
Isolation is enforced by the database, not by our query code: Postgres row-level security, forced — it binds our own application user too. Mailbox tokens are separately encrypted with a key held outside the database.
Your mail and documents are never used to train models — ours or anyone else's. Our Privacy Policy says so in writing.
See it running
From the recap arriving to the final SOF closing the voyage — thirty minutes, live, with one of the founders.
Or apply for access if your desk is ready to try it.
