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How Fleetzero Is Electrifying Commercial Shipping — and What Its Go-to-Market Says About Selling Into Slow Industries

When Mike Carter and his co-founder Steven were studying ship propulsion at the US Merchant Marine Academy, their textbooks were printed in the 1960s.

That detail wasn’t just depressing — it was diagnostic. If the training materials for one of the world’s most critical industries hadn’t been updated in six decades, the underlying technology probably hadn’t either. And if roughly 90% of the world’s goods were moving on diesel-powered vessels running on largely unchanged propulsion systems, the gap between what batteries could now do and what the industry was actually deploying was enormous.

That gap became Fleetzero.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Mike Carter, Co-Founder of Fleetzero, walked through how two ship engineers built a go-to-market for one of the most structurally resistant sales environments you can find — a global, slow-moving, multi-stakeholder industry where the dominant competitive force isn’t a rival product. It’s inertia.

The Thesis Nobody Asked For

Mike and his co-founder Steven grew up together in Asheville, North Carolina, became mariners, studied ship design at Kings Point, and went on to careers in the energy industry — Mike at an offshore drilling contractor in Houston and later in software, Steven running offshore platforms for Shell.

During Covid, they started doing what ship engineers do when left alone with a problem: math. They wanted to know which technology, if not a liquid fuel, would govern the future of maritime propulsion. They ran the numbers on every alternative — ammonia, methanol, LNG — and kept arriving at the same answer. Batteries.

Not for ferries or harbor tugs, where electrification already existed. For container ships, bulkers, and offshore supply vessels — the large commercial fleet that actually moves global trade.

“We found that there was a solution for propulsion of ship technology to be replaced with batteries,” Mike said. “And that’s what we started focusing our efforts on.”

The counterintuitive part: vessel owners were the most skeptical. The venture community understood the thesis faster than the operators who would actually benefit from it. Early adopters weren’t the obvious candidates.

Why They Bought a Ship

Fleetzero was founded in 2021. Two years later, they had a vessel on the water — fast by any standard, and remarkable in an industry where engineering timelines are measured in decades.

The move that made it possible wasn’t a product decision. It was an organizational one.

Rather than waiting for customer contracts to close before developing real operational expertise, Fleetzero purchased a 265-foot offshore supply vessel and used it as a live training environment. The problem they were solving wasn’t technical — it was that they had hired engineers from two completely non-overlapping disciplines: people who understood maritime operations and people who understood battery systems. Neither group could do the other’s job. Waiting for customer engagements to bridge that gap would have been too slow and too expensive.

“When we started Fleet Zero, that was kind of a core thesis of ours. If we wanted to change the industry, we had to do it quickly, within our lifetime,” Mike said.

They deployed their Leviathan battery system on that vessel in a single day. Those early hires now lead different parts of the company. The vessel didn’t just accelerate product development — it built the organizational capability that made everything after it faster.

The Multi-Stakeholder Problem

Fleetzero’s sales process involves three distinct groups: vessel owners, system integrators, and shipyards. Understanding the difference between them — and why each one matters — is central to how Fleetzero runs deals.

Vessel owners are the ultimate customer. They hold the asset for years, sometimes decades, and the economics of their operating model drive the buying decision. Integrators and shipyards have significant technical influence over how electrification gets implemented — and significant ability to derail a deal even when the owner wants to move forward.

“If you have a vessel owner that’s really excited about your product, but a system integrator that maybe not as excited about your product, they can start to steer the owner away from it,” Mike said.

The implication isn’t just to manage stakeholders carefully. It’s that a single champion, no matter how senior, provides no protection against a motivated skeptic in another part of the buying committee. Fleetzero runs parallel relationship tracks across all three groups from the start — not as a follow-up motion after an owner shows interest, but as the default structure of every sales engagement.

Leading with Economics, Not Mission

Most alternative maritime fuels — ammonia, methanol, LNG — cost more to operate than diesel. This is the central commercial reality that shapes Fleetzero’s entire pitch.

“A lot of green technologies, so to speak, are more expensive than diesel,” Mike said.

So Fleetzero doesn’t lead with sustainability. They lead with a three-to-five year payback period — something vessel owners say they’ve never been offered before with any competing technology. When a project’s economics stretch beyond six or seven years, Mike’s team doesn’t push it through. They tell the owner the project doesn’t make sense yet and suggest revisiting in a couple of years.

This filter does something important beyond protecting margins: it builds credibility in an industry where trust accumulates slowly and a single bad recommendation follows you for years.

Selling Against the Decision to Do Nothing

The most clarifying thing Mike said about competition had nothing to do with another electrification company.

“I think our biggest adversary in the sales cycle is just the do nothing decision,” he said — vessel owners who acknowledge the technology works but choose to keep running diesel and revisit later.

Fleetzero’s response to this is structural. They maintain active relationships with every account that passes, because the underlying economics keep improving. Battery prices continue to fall. Energy density keeps rising. Projects that didn’t pencil out two years ago are starting to look obvious. Several owners who originally passed have already come back.

This requires a different kind of pipeline discipline than most B2B sales organizations build — one that tracks relationship quality with dormant accounts as rigorously as active ones, and that treats a “not yet” as a position on a timeline rather than a closed loss.

Discovery Before Assumption

Fleetzero’s flagship project — building the world’s longest-range hybrid electric vessel — started when an internal champion at a Houston-based maritime operator submitted a contact form after seeing Fleetzero in the news.

What happened next is the part worth studying. Rather than moving to a proposal, Mike’s team sat down with the owner’s operations group, finance department, and the people who actually worked on the vessels — before making any assumptions about what batteries could do for them. That discovery process surfaced specific projects with clear economics. One of them became the flagship contract.

The lesson isn’t about inbound response time. It’s that a rigorous multi-stakeholder discovery process — even when a customer arrives already interested — identifies better projects, builds broader internal trust, and produces deals that are structurally harder to unwind before they close.

Fleetzero’s investors now include Maersk and MOL, two of the world’s largest shipping companies, who function as both financial backers and operating partners as the company expands beyond propulsion into uncrewed vessel operations and remote ship control.

Mike’s view on the long arc is direct: “The overwhelming majority of vessels will be electric in the future. It’s just a reality that is coming.” He draws the analogy himself — the operators who move early on electrification will benefit the same way operators did when shipping transitioned from the unpredictable schedules of wind to the reliability of coal. Those who wait will find themselves behind companies that were building institutional knowledge years before the market made the decision obvious.

The full conversation with Mike Carter is available now on BUILDERS.