Our Story

Norsepower was founded in late 2012 with a mission to bring sails back to shipping. It has created and taken over the wind propulsion market – and remains its global market and thought leader. Norsepower is now in a unique position to utilize the booming market driven by multiple megatrends, such as volatile fuel prices, climate change induced tightening regulations, and the demand for ESG actions by shipowners, charterers, investors, organizations and the public. Norsepower’s maritime domain knowledge combined with our AI, software and machine learning expertise also help in our R&D, control systems and preventive maintenance. The control system Norsepower Sentient Control™ is a prime example of this kind of AI application.

Norsepower Rotor Sail™ is a radically modernized version of the old Flettner rotor. The concept of the Flettner rotor was first devised by Finnish inventor and architect Sigurd Savonius and German engineer Anton Flettner in the 1920s. The first Atlantic crossing – by a vessel using Flettner rotors only – took place in 1926. However, technical challenges and the market situation prevented more widespread application.

A hundred years later, Norsepower’s business concept was initially developed in collaboration between founding board members Moray Martin of MB Martin and Partners Limited, and Erik Floman from Korkia Venture Insight.

After exiting an IT company in 2012, Tuomas Riski, co-founder of Norsepower, started looking for a new cleantech concept—something that would have a significant impact on global CO₂ emissions, and potentially a base for a new start-up company. Tuomas happened to meet a team of people, including famous naval architect, Professor, Dr. H.C Kai Levander from Finland. Levander had an idea of bringing a radically modernized Flettner rotor to the market. His ideas are still reflected in the core mechanics of Norsepower Rotor Sail™. From this union of well-known principles and radical innovation, a novel, market-dominating product was born. Later, the name “rotor sail”, coined by Norsepower, became widely used by the whole industry.

After Tuomas Riski had grown the company through the startup phase and near the industrial serial production phase, M.Sc. (Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering) & eMBA (Kellogg-WHU) Heikki Pöntynen took the helm. Pöntynen has rapidly and successfully scaled the operations of Norsepower to mass production capable industrial company that dominates the booming, global wind propulsion market.