Schulte Group Innoport

Yiannis Sykas, Managing Director, leads the investment process. He is also Director of Strategy and Product Development at Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement and a member of the management board. Day-to-day deal execution is handled by Investment Director Haymon Sinapius and Investment Manager Andreas Michaelides, with Singapore-based origination run by Michael Titzck.

Innoport is the corporate venture arm of the Schulte Group — it does not raise third-party capital or report a fund size. Every investment is a direct equity stake funded by the parent company’s balance sheet, which gives portfolio companies access to Schulte’s global fleet, port network, and technical teams for pilot projects and commercial partnerships.

Innoport focuses on early-stage and seed-stage ventures. Investments across the portfolio — from a 2019 entry into Convelio at its early logistics phase to a 2024 check into Secro for electronic bills of lading — consistently target companies before they reach significant commercial scale, often where Schulte’s infrastructure can accelerate product validation.

The portfolio weights heavily toward Europe — Germany, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Iceland, and the UK — alongside a meaningful Asian cluster anchored in Singapore. Innoport has also invested in Africa, backing Gozem across Francophone West and Central Africa and Kelp Blue off Namibia’s coast.

The parent group’s ships, port operations, and engineering teams act as a live testing environment. Innoport explicitly structures relationships so that portfolio companies can pilot technologies within Schulte’s operational footprint — using its vessels for drone-delivery trials, its procurement channels for container-trading platforms, and its management companies for decarbonization software like zero44.

It is a pure corporate venture firm. Unlike a multi-family office, Innoport does not serve external families or manage diversified pools of assets — it invests a single corporate parent’s capital into a thematically narrow portfolio of maritime and logistics startups.

Innoport does not invest in consumer internet, pure software-as-a-service outside supply-chain applications, or biotechnology. The portfolio stays strictly inside the intersection of maritime, logistics, and industrial decarbonization, reflecting the parent company’s operational expertise and asset base.