D-Ice Engineering takes over Great Circle
Great Circle, the weather forecasting and routing specialist founded by Gerald Bibot following his participation in the 2007 Transat Jacques Vabre, is changing hands. The Belgian company has been acquired by the French company D-Ice Engineering, also active in the field of routing. "We've been working with Christian Dumard for some time now on various projects. He accompanies the thesis of Maxime Dupuy, an engineer in the team, on routing. He is the one who put us in touch with Geld Bibot and Great Circle. We share the same values and the same attraction for the maritime world in general. 10 years after its creation, Great Circle was on a new cycle, and it was a good fit," explains Sofien Kerkeni, founder of D-Ice Engineering.
All 5 Great Circle employees join the 23 employees of D-Ice Engineering.
Develop routing offers for all types of boats
Both companies have been working for several years on their routing algorithms for boats, both for ocean racing and professional vessels. Great Circle is a weather partner of several ocean racing events. Their common goal is now to continue developments by sharing their know-how. "We've already done a lot of work at D-Ice, especially with SATORI on multi-objective routing. It worked well with Yannick Bestaven in IMOCA . The algorithms work the same whether the input data is forecast or incast (editor's note: weather forecasts or past statistical weather data); the goal is to work on routing planning. We will continue to develop Squid, under this name and with the existing teams. We will benefit from these technologies to make them available to other sectors. In the long term, we will be able to continue to develop Squid with the developments of D-Ice and democratize what we do for other projects such as Canopée (Editor's note: Project for a rigid-sail cargo ship currently under construction). We're signing up for 5 to 10 years of development!" concludes Sofien Kerkeni.
