Theia

Theia is SynMax's maritime intelligence platform. Most vessel monitoring relies on AIS, which is self-reported: vessels involved in sanctions evasion, smuggling or illegal fishing switch it off, spoof their position or share identities. Theia treats AIS as one input and verifies it against observation from orbit. It fuses AIS with high-resolution optical satellite imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which detects vessels day or night and through cloud, and open-source intelligence such as public registries, port records, ownership databases and sanctions lists. SynMax's partner Planet supplies near-daily PlanetScope imagery as the optical baseline.

Machine-learning models find vessels in the imagery, cross-reference them against AIS positions to flag dark and spoofing ships, and use behavioural fingerprinting and multi-source fusion to attribute hulls to named vessels. Six capabilities are offered: dark vessel detection, AIS spoofing detection, ship-to-ship transfer detection, vessel attribution, military vessel detection and IUU fishing detection. SynMax states that Theia analyses more than 40 million km² of the Earth's surface daily and monitors over 300,000 unique vessels.

Results are delivered through a web dashboard, a RESTful API and GeoJSON, S3 or CSV data delivery, with cloud, on-premise and disconnected deployment profiles for government users. Buyers include government and defence, maritime insurers, shipping operators, financial institutions, energy traders and port authorities. The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded SynMax a Theia pilot in 2024 and a $12.8 million maritime analytics contract in 2025, and Theia is Awardable on the US Department of Defense CDAO Tradewinds marketplace. SynMax also holds a renewed $7.5 million contract with the US Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific supporting the US Department of Transportation's SeaVision platform, and US Navy Third Fleet and US Coast Guard Sector Key West are quoted as Theia users on the product page.