While in business school, Matthew Costello could not kick the thought of all the inefficiencies within the maritime shipping industry. He asked a friend, Bret Smart, to help him look into some of the logistical communications issues within the industry. The two co-founders of Houston-based Voyager started asking some questions for all the different parties involved in shipping across seas.

"The data we got back was pretty alarming," Costello says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. "It basically showed that whoever you speak to in the maritime industry, people are spending about 40 percent of their day on what we would consider low-value, low-complexity tasks."

Some of these tasks included copying and pasting information from spreadsheets, forwarding materials to the right person, and countless emails — sometimes even 10,000 emails for just one large shipment.

The duo created Voyager, a software-as-a-service company that connects the various entities involved in a shipment, to solve this massive communications problem.

"It essentially works very similar to a project management tool," Costello, who is the CEO of the company, says. "When you think of a voyage where you have a large oil and gas company shipping 100,000 barrels from Houston to Singapore, right now, that voyage will involve 10 different companies located all around the world with 50 to 100 different users.

"With Voyager, what it allows companies to do is essentially have all of those counter parties working together in a shared environment to manage the voyage together — entirely email free," Costello says, adding that their software is also able to automate parts of the process as well as collect data for analysis.

In August, Voyager closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding and has eight clients working with the software. In the last episode of the podcast for 2019, Costello shares his international fundraising story, what he has lined up for Voyager in 2020, and more. Stream the episode below and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.