Alumni Story: How David Kaiser & Michael Stein Turned a KLU Bond into the Business of Vesselity

Name: David Kaiser
Degree: MSc in Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Class of 2014
Position, Company: IT Consultant | Retail Systems & Processes, bandtworks GmbH
Self-employment: Co-Founder / CTO, Vesselity Maritime Analytics GmbH

Name: Michael Stein
Degree: MSc in Management, Class of 2014
Position, 1. Company: Founder / CEO, Stein Maritime Consulting
Position 2. Company:  Co-Founder / CEO, Vesselity Maritime Analytics GmbH

Looking back to your time at KLU - you were among the pioneering students who enrolled in 2012. What stood out most about your degree program, and how did your coursework prepare you for the professional world?

David Kaiser:

Coming to Hamburg for my master’s degree at KLU felt like coming to a different world. The bachelor program I had gone through in my hometown had consisted of large classes of up to 700 students which often left me fending for myself in what felt like a very impersonal and uncaring environment. By contrast, KLU offered an intense but caring learning space with a climate of constantly having new challenges thrown at you and then mastering them as part of a close-knit, multicultural team. This prepared me very well for my professional life. It taught me to really consider my peers’ positions and thinking outside of my own little box.

Michael Stein:

I started my career with a vocational training as a Schifffahrtskaufmann (shipping merchant) and worked as a junior consultant for a large German shipowner. While I was doing my full-time job, I pursued a part-time Bachelor’s degree at London Metropolitan University in a specialized program called Shipping, Trade and Transport. Although I have a deep passion for ships and the maritime sector, in 2012, I found myself at odds with the industry’s rigid traditionalism—a mindset that, in my view, stifled innovation. (Admittedly, I’ve always had a punk spirit.) I quickly realized that if I wanted to make a meaningful impact, I’d need to carve my own path. But first, I had to understand how businesses operate—and how to build one. I saw Kühne Logistics University (KLU) as the right place to advance my business knowledge to a corporate level. I appreciated the diverse and international student body, representing a broad spectrum of industries and academic backgrounds. To my surprise, I even developed a fondness for writing academic papers—something I still consider a strange personal hobby. By late 2018, the opportunity finally came to put my skills to the test and launch my own business. I had moved from “confined ports” to open “blue seas”—and KLU had given me the map to navigate them.
 

How did the two of you meet at KLU, and what experiences during your studies laid the groundwork for your lasting friendship and future collaboration?

David Kaiser:

We met during the initial “welcome days” and quickly discovered that we shared a lot of common interests and a certain lunatic energy that always drives us towards trying out new, interesting things.
Over the coming months, our friendship grew as we navigated our shared daily life – both in the bright hallways of KLU and the many murky nightclubs that Hamburg has to offer. 
When the time came for the trimester abroad, we decided to stick together and go to Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The months we spent there together truly galvanized us into the duo infernale we’ve been ever since.
 

Michael Stein:

I met David shortly after graduation and immediately recognized a kindred spirit—just as nerdy as me, though in his own unique way. We hit it off instantly. Living only 800 meters apart, I often loaded up my tower PC onto my bike, grabbed some beer, and crashed on his couch (uninvited, of course) for spontaneous LAN parties. I introduced him to Hamburg, and together we explored the city's underground clubs, drawn by our shared taste in music and people and we played endless rounds of Magic: The Gathering. 
Then came Rotterdam—a truly mind-opening experience. I’ll never forget the time David and I tried to buy a BBQ and charcoal at the end of October. After half a day of searching, we finally stumbled upon an 80-something-year-old hardware store owner. Explaining our mission turned into an impromptu German-Dutch intercultural management seminar—one we still laugh about today.
 

Fast-forward to today: how did the idea for Vesselity come about, and what inspired you to take the leap into co-founding the company together?

David Kaiser:

During the Covid lockdown, I decided to dig deeper into the field of machine learning to sharpen my data analytics skills and finally do something I’ve been interested in for a long time: Building AI systems. The concept of teaching computers how to solve exotic, complex tasks fascinates me. Of course, I had no idea how massive the generative AI hype would become only a few years later. I just wanted to understand the actual process by which machines “learn”.  At the same time Michael had his own futuristic ideas about drones. When I told him about my experiments with image recognition using neural networks, he came up with this idea of training a model on the images his underwater drones captured to identify various types of flora and fauna that would grow on the hulls of maritime vessels. After 5 weeks of long, sleepless nights full of research, preparing images and training bigger and bigger models, we suddenly had our first working proof of concept. That initial spark, that first time I see a system fulfill the task I designed and built it for, will never lose its magic for me. A few more months of refining our technique later, we felt that this actually had the potential to be a successful business venture. The rest, as they say, is history…

Michael Stein:

I knew that ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles), or “underwater drones,” would be the future of shipping inspection the moment I first laid hands on such a system in 2016. The technology was still immature and expensive, but the market looked promising.
In 2019, my first year as a self-employed professional, I invested into a Norwegian ROV, managed to land a few ship inspection jobs and, in the process, gathered a solid dataset of underwater images.
From my studies, I already knew there was a kind of holy grail in ship performance analysis: calculating a ship’s fuel consumption based on the marine fouling coverage on its hull. Everyone in the industry understood the impact, but no one had figured out how to calculate it, as it required extracting data from video feeds using advanced mathematics—far beyond my own capabilities.

A year later, during the lockdown, I remember David mentioning a method of teaching a computer to understand images in a mathematical way that imitates intelligence. At the time, I was busy trying to grasp crypto trading, frustrated that I had missed some opportunities and ended up buying BTC at what I thought was a high price (little did I know how wrong I was, from a 2025 perspective). One day, I saw David amusing himself by training a model to distinguish between puppies and muffins. Out of boredom—and perhaps a bit of challenge—I gave him a set of ROV images of ship hulls with algae, taken in dim lighting conditions and with motion blur. I said, “Screw your muffins. If you're really talented, find the algae in these images using your computer vision.” I was convinced I had given him an impossible task, and figured we could get back to focusing on our survival RPGs—both virtual and real—at the time. Five weeks later, I had completely forgotten about the conversation, when David—looking slightly sleep-deprived—told me he had something interesting to show me. I saw what he had done. I understood the potential. And from that moment on, I went down the rabbit hole.
 

What advice would you give to current students, recent graduates, or even prospective students just beginning their academic or career journeys?

David Kaiser:

Be open, be curious, question everything and listen honestly! Try to approach everyone and everything with an attitude of “what can I learn from you?” Be mindful that even the most sophisticated plans rarely survive their first collision with reality. Don’t let that discourage you! There is a famous paradigm in systems design: “Fail early!” What it means is: test your assumptions as soon as possible, identify what doesn’t work, and use those learnings to adjust fast. It’s not about wanting to fail – it’s about recognizing that failure is feedback. The sooner you get that feedback, the less costly it is, and the better your eventual solution will be. This mindset isn’t just for software or startups. It applies just as much to your studies, your career, and your relationships. You’ll never have perfect information but you can always improve if you’re willing to learn from the outcomes.
 

Michael Stein:

If you're starting your career in 2025 or later, you're walking into a minefield. The last 10 years have changed the world exponentially: Global warfare is back on the table, corporate superpowers and political dictatorships are on the rise, Web 2.0 is decaying, a major financial crisis is likely in the next 12–18 months, and the climate? It's honestly just fucked. Oh—and let’s not forget AI, which, with 85% confidence, will replace you before you even hit a senior role. I`d say you have two options:
Option 1: Learn data science and AI. Use it to push your productivity to superhuman levels.
Find a niche, own it, and extract value while the gold rush lasts. Sell shovels if you can’t mine gold. Get familiar with crypto—it might just take you from broke to bootstrapper, and maybe help you bootstrap your own AI company. And if all goes well, hopefully, you’ve bought a house with high walls before the system collapses.
Option 2: Sit back and accept that you were born at the wrong time. Enjoy the beauty of chaos, retreat to a cabin in the woods, and ride out the collapse getting high on your own supply. Maybe there’s a third way: Ignore the signs of doom, pray I’m wrong, and be a good citizen. Who knows? 
 

To hear more about David and Michael's story, follow this link to the latest podcast episode "In Port & Learning" from June 18th, where David and Michael dive deeper into the vision that shaped their company, the challenges they faced in starting up, and what truly sets their business apart.