By Robbin Laird
When I spoke recently with Ami Daniel, the CEO and co-founder of Windward, I came away convinced that his company has been building toward something that most of the defense and intelligence establishment has been too slow to grasp: that in an era when no single navy can police the world’s oceans, the only viable path to maritime security is shared, scalable, commercially accessible intelligence. Windward is not the only player in this space, but it may be the most conceptually serious one.
Daniel is not a typical tech CEO. At age sixteen he built a community center worth a million dollars, by nineteen won every major youth excellence award his country had to offer, and then joined the Navy as a surface warfare officer. In 2006, his ship was struck by Iranian-supplied C-802 missiles. Four crew members died. Twelve were wounded. He was lucky to be alive. Two years later, he left the Navy.
That experience of operating in a complex, dangerous maritime environment, where the adversary used deception, where Iranian proxy capabilities were being actively employed, where the rules of the sea were being contested in real time, shaped everything that came after. In 2009, Daniel and his co-founder Matan Peled, also a Navy veteran, began thinking about what it would mean to bring genuine visibility to the world’s oceans. The first days of satellite AIS data were just arriving. The first radar-rate satellites were emerging. They saw an opportunity, and they took it.
“I told my wife, honey, there’s good news and bad news,” Daniel recalled. “The good news is it was right. The wrong news is I was slightly off on timing by about fifteen years.”
Building the Intelligence Authority of the Oceans
Windward describes its mission as becoming what Daniel calls “the intelligence authority of the oceans.” That phrase is worth unpacking, because it signals a very different ambition from simply aggregating ship-tracking data.
When the company was founded, perhaps half a percent of the world’s vessels were “going dark” or switching off their AIS transponders or otherwise evading tracking. Today, Daniel estimates that figure has climbed to roughly forty percent. That is an eighty-fold increase in deliberate maritime opacity. The shadow fleet that Russia has assembled to move sanctioned oil, the deceptive shipping practices employed by North Korea to evade UN monitoring, the undeclared cargoes moving through the Strait of Hormuz, these are not edge cases. They have become core features of the maritime environment.
Windward’s response has been to build what it calls a multi-source intelligence architecture. AIS is the starting point, but the company’s analysts and systems ingest a much broader range of inputs: port lineups, port reports, remote sensing data including electro-optical imagery, radio frequency analysis, synthetic aperture radar, ownership and corporate registry data, and sources that Daniel, appropriately, declined to detail publicly. The goal is to answer not just where a ship is, but what it is doing, who owns it, what it is carrying, and what that means for the customers who need to act on that information.
“I can tell you that there are ships in the Gulf,” Daniel explained. “But what do you care about? Where are the IRGC fast boats? Where are the dark tankers? Where is the first LPG non-declared cargo going out? That is the difference between data and intelligence. We are an intelligence business. We are not simply a data business.”
To operationalize this, Windward built what it calls its Maritime Intelligence Operations Center (MIOC), a mission-ready managed service staffed by Windward domain experts, analysts, and engineers around the globe that provides continuous monitoring and investigations.
Daniel also noted that Windward has undergone a significant ownership transformation, taking the company private under U.S. private equity, backed by roughly 95 to 96 percent American shareholders. The company now holds a facility clearance and conducts top secret work for the U.S. Department of War.
Windward also recently appointed retired Vice Admiral Bob Sharp, formerly Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, as its Chief Maritime Intelligence Officer. Sharp, a man who spent his career at the very center of America’s maritime intelligence community, has chosen to help build maritime intelligence that is commercial, shareable, and usable by defense partners.
The Structural Problem: Global Commons Without a Global Policeman
The deeper argument that emerged from our conversation is not really about Windward’s product suite. It is about the structural transformation of maritime security since the Cold War, and what is required to manage it.
For roughly fifty years, the United States Navy functioned as the enforcer of the global rules-based maritime order. It was not really a “global commons” in any neutral or multilateral sense. It was, as I put it to Daniel, the American commons, underwritten by American naval power and American willingness to sustain that commitment. That era is over, and no amount of nostalgia or recrimination is going to bring it back.
“The US did take the role of the global rule-based order leader,” Daniel acknowledged, “including in its definition of LRIT after 9/11. And LRIT actually did not take off globally because of that because it was a U.S. initiative, not a global initiative.”
This is a subtle but important point. The Long-Range Identification and Tracking system was technically sound, but its governance model was American, which made it difficult to build the genuine international buy-in that a global maritime identification architecture requires. The shadow fleet phenomenon and the broader collapse of AIS compliance among vessels serving authoritarian state interests reflect in part the limits of an architecture built around American hegemony rather than shared rules that all states have endorsed and invested in.
The problem now is not simply tracking bad actors. The problem is building the conceptual and institutional foundation for a rules-based maritime order that can function without an American navy large enough to enforce it everywhere at once. That requires data that is shareable, affordable, and available to partners who are neither full U.S. allies nor adversaries, countries like Malaysia or Indonesia that have their own interests in maritime security and their own calculations about alignment.
Daniel put it succinctly: “Everything that comes from a cleared source is just not shareable. If you have something in aisle seven, you can’t give it to aisle two. So if you sign up to the logic chain of the age of chaos, the bifurcation of the world, the fact that the U.S. Navy will not be the sole guarantor of the rule-based order, the fact that authoritarian regimes will not play ball, you need to create a common ground to create that new rule-based order.”
Deceptive Shipping, Sanctions, and the Shadow Fleet
Windward’s commercial origins in sanctions compliance and deceptive shipping practices turned out to be less niche than they might initially have appeared. The techniques that North Korea pioneered for evading UN sanctions on its weapons programs — ship-to-ship transfers in international waters, transponder manipulation, flag-of-convenience structures layered through opaque corporate registries — have become the operational playbook for a much broader range of state-sponsored evasion.
Windward was, by its own account, the first commercial entity to systematically research and name deceptive shipping practices, working with the UN Security Council’s DPRK monitoring panel. That research contributed to what became formal regulatory language adopted by both the United States and the United Kingdom in their sanctions frameworks in May 2020. The language describes how vessels “go dark” to evade tracking, how cargo is concealed through documentation fraud, and how ownership structures are layered to obscure beneficial control. Much of that conceptual vocabulary now embedded in regulatory practice originated with Windward’s analytical work.
The current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has made these questions acutely operational. Daniel described receiving roughly a hundred phone calls a day asking what is happening to oil transits through the strait. AIS provides part of the picture, but he estimated that over the past sixty days, AIS has given perhaps fifty percent of the true operational picture of what is moving through that chokepoint. The other fifty percent requires the multi-source fusion that Windward has spent fifteen years building toward.
The supply chain implications are significant beyond the immediate military dimension. Strategic petroleum reserves are finite and have already been drawn down substantially. If the straits remain contested, the cumulative effect on global oil supply is not indefinitely deferrable. The intelligence to understand what is actually moving or not moving through that corridor is not an abstract analytical luxury. It is operationally critical for governments, energy companies, and anyone with exposure to global supply chain risk.
Toward a New Maritime Intelligence Architecture
The conversation with Daniel pointed toward a set of requirements that neither the U.S. government nor the commercial maritime intelligence sector has fully articulated, let alone addressed.
First, the intelligence architecture for a multipolar maritime environment cannot be built around exquisite classified capabilities. The partners whose cooperation is essential for managing the global commons — allied navies, coast guards, port authorities, shipping companies, flag states — cannot be given access to intelligence derived from classified sources. A maritime commons that can only be secured by sharing intelligence that cannot be shared is not a viable commons. The bias toward exquisite collection and away from shareable intelligence is a structural problem in how the U.S. government has organized its maritime domain awareness investments, and it will not be solved without deliberate policy decisions at a high level.
Second, the distinction between crisis management and chaos management matters for how intelligence requirements are framed. In a crisis — a specific confrontation with Iran, a particular sanctions evasion episode — the demand is for precise, timely, actionable intelligence about specific actors. In an environment of chronic, persistent, multi-directional maritime disorder, the demand is different: it is for a sustained, comprehensive, shared picture of what normal looks like, so that deviations from normal can be detected reliably and attributed accurately. That is a different architecture, with different cost structures and different governance models.
Third, the transition from U.S. naval dominance to a more distributed maritime security architecture will require investments in partner capacity that go beyond hardware. The European navies that deployed to the Red Sea without anti-missile munitions were not underfunded in any simple sense. They had capital ships. They lacked the doctrine, the logistics, and in some cases the political will to operationalize maritime security independently. Shared intelligence — trusted, unclassified, commercially derived — is one of the few tools that can accelerate allied capability development without requiring the years of training and procurement that platform-centered capacity building demands.
Windward is well positioned to contribute to all three of these requirements. Its commercial model, its multi-source architecture, its global operational footprint, and its U.S. clearance status place it at a useful intersection of commercial flexibility and government relevance.
Whether that potential is fully realized, in my view, depends on whether the U.S. defense establishment can shift enough of its conceptual weight away from the exquisite and classified toward the shared and actionable.