IDsure Closes €600k Seed Round to Scale Digital Certificate Infrastructure

[By: IDsure]

IDsure, the digital identity infrastructure for the maritime industry, today announced the close of a €600,000 seed round. The funding will accelerate IDsure's rollout on two fronts: direct relationships with flag states and training institutes on the issuance side, and a growing ecosystem of service providers building IDsure-powered experiences for ship managers, employers, and seafarers themselves.

A maritime industry that runs on paper, ready to move

More than two million seafarers work across roughly 75,000 merchant ships and thousands of training centres. Today, their identities and certificates still travel in paper folders. Verification can take hours. Documents can be — and are — forged. IDsure was built to fix that, with three capabilities now operational with launch partners:

• ID-verified seafarers. Aviation-grade identity verification (in partnership with SITA) issues each seafarer with a digital identity they carry in a GDPR-compliant mobile app.
• Tamper-proof certificates. Every certificate of competency, STCW endorsement, and seafarer record-book entry is cryptographically signed and permanently recorded on the Concordium blockchain — immutable, tamper-evident, and independently verifiable.
• Instant verification. Port authorities, ship managers, and employers verify a credential in seconds via QR scan — no phone call, no paperwork, no waiting for the issuing authority to open.

The platform is designed around STCW, ILO 185, and flag state requirements from day one, with three deployments anchoring the rollout: the Bahamas Maritime Authority (digital seafarer record books and competency certificates across an entire national registry), Columbia Shipmanagement (digital crew certificate and identity pilot for bridge officers), and SITA (identity verification infrastructure).

Infrastructure, not another vertical app

Where most maritime tech vendors build vertically — one tool for a flag state, another for a ship manager, another for a training centre — IDsure has been built as the infrastructure layer underneath all of them. Flag states and training institutes issue and write directly into the platform. Service providers — including LEDGID, and a growing number of others — build the apps and workflows that ship managers, employers, port authorities, and seafarers actually use day to day. IDsure stays in its lane: the trust layer underneath. We do not build the customer-facing tools; our partners do.

"For too long, maritime has run on paper," said Jesper Holmgren, Founder & CEO of IDsure and a former Master Mariner. "A seafarer's record book gets photocopied dozens of times. Certificates take hours to verify. Both can be forged. We built IDsure to fix all three of those things — by issuing verifiable identity, making certificates tamper-proof, and letting any authorised counterparty check them in seconds. This round lets us scale that infrastructure across the industry that's been asking for it."

Trust as a Service

That horizontal design is what lets IDsure deliver what the company calls Trust as a Service — identity and certificates as a capability the entire maritime ecosystem can build on, regardless of which national registry or commercial service provider sits at either end of a transaction. It is also what allows IDsure to grow alongside its service-provider partners rather than against them: where they build experiences, IDsure builds infrastructure.

What the funding enables

• Deepening direct relationships with the issuers — additional flag states and training institutes.
• Expanding the service-provider ecosystem with developer APIs, SDKs, and support for partners building IDsure-powered apps and workflows.
• Continued investment in the verification stack and the certificate issuance pipeline.
• Selective team growth across engineering, partnerships, and maritime affairs.