Zerua Tech Presents the NBunker Project at SAIL INN PRO 2026 in Bilbao

On October 29, Zerua Tech presented its work on NBunker, a Navozyme project, at SAIL INN PRO 2026, the professional event for entrepreneurship and innovation in the nautical and maritime sector, held at the B Accelerator Tower (BAT) in Bilbao, the same building that hosts our offices. Abolfazl Shirazi, CEO and Founder of Zerua Tech, delivered a ten-minute pitch to an audience of shipyards, technology providers, research centers, port authorities and startups from the maritime world.

NBunker is a Navozyme project for bunkering operations in ports, and Zerua Tech is the team behind its AI models. It starts from a simple observation: ships wait, and waiting pollutes. The duration of a bunkering operation used to be estimated with a fixed formula, and a vessel waiting at anchorage burns fuel and emits CO₂ while it does. NBunker replaces that formula with three AI models that learn from real operations and AIS satellite data, and turn the fuel request and the barge availability into a realistic schedule.

The three models answer the questions that matter for planning: when will the vessel arrive, how long will the barge stay alongside it, and when will the vessel leave the anchorage. They were trained and tested on two years of AIS data and thousands of real bunkering operations, and in our tests they predict these events considerably better than the reference methods based on fixed formulas and simple rules.

The impact follows a clear chain: less waiting at anchorage means less fuel burned, and less fuel burned means fewer CO₂ emissions. Decarbonization was one of the main themes of SAIL INN PRO 2026, which made the event the right place to show how data and Artificial Intelligence can contribute to it in daily port operations. The first version of the system is currently being integrated into real port operations.

We would like to thank the organizers of SAIL INN PRO 2026 for the opportunity and for the photos of the session, the Navozyme team for their trust in our work on NBunker, and BAT for hosting such a valuable meeting point for the maritime and innovation community. Zerua Tech will keep developing AI-driven technologies for maritime operations and other demanding engineering sectors.