The Ocean Opportunity Lab: Wavemakers Podcast - When Wind Meets Software: Di’s Mission with Smart Green Shipping
What happens when Formula One thinking, offshore yacht grit, and climate urgency collide? You get Di Gilpin—UK founder & CEO of Smart Green Shipping, bringing wind back to shipping with 21st-century intelligence.
On this episode of the Wavemakers Podcast by TOOL, hosted by Birgit M. Liodden, Di shares how her path from early mobile telecoms to F1, yacht racing, and renewables led to an elegant truth: ships can move on wind—and software can make it seamless. Smart Green Shipping’s automated wing sails deploy, retract, and optimize themselves, measuring fuel savings and generating compliance certificates—no crew micromanagement required.
From the first sparks of climate awareness to building certified hardware (out of metal, tested at sea, the hard way), Di is reshaping incentives in a fuel-centric industry and calling in patient capital to scale what’s now inevitable: wind in shipping.