What inspired me to start NURA was a deep passion to give back to the seafaring community in a meaningful way. Having spent years running a very large ship management company, I gained firsthand insight into the challenges, pressures and realities faced by seafarers at every level. That experience shaped my understanding of what truly makes a difference in this industry.
Four decades at sea and ashore teach you what matters, and what an owner is really trusting you with. Aga Nagarajan and Kannan Soundararajan spent those years running large fleets, between them covering both halves of the job: the people who run ships, and the machinery that moves them.
NURA was built to bring all of it to a more personal scale, where senior judgement reaches every vessel and nothing is too small to get attention. What those decades taught them became the conviction NURA is built on: what truly protects a vessel is attention, accountability and experience. The owner kept informed, the right call made even when no one is watching, the problem caught while it's still small, and every vessel managed as if it were our own.
NURA was born from a desire to use that experience not only to operate ships, but to positively impact the people who make global trade possible. A path to create value, support and opportunity for the seafaring community in a way that is practical, informed, and rooted in real-world maritime leadership. Because in the end, a vessel is only ever as safe and well run as the people behind it. When you take care of the people, they take good care of your vessel.
Two long careers in ship management, at sea and ashore. One specialised in the people who run ships, the other in the machinery that moves them.
Aga's career at sea began in 1976. Over the years that followed he sailed every class of vessel, rising from Cadet to Master Mariner, learning ships from the deck up, in the only place that teaches it properly.
In 1997 he came ashore to join Fleet Management, one of the industry's largest ship managers, and over nearly three decades helped shape its growth. He rose to Executive Director, with a seat at the centre of how a large managed fleet is run, accountable to shipowners for the vessels in the company's care, and to the thousands of seafarers who crewed them. It gave him a rare, two-sided understanding of the business: what an owner needs to trust a manager with their asset, and what a crew needs to run that asset safely and well, and how a good manager holds both at once.
Much of that came down to people. He led the seagoing human-capital strategy across the entire managed fleet, built the firm's crew offices in the Philippines and China, and in 2011 founded its seafarer-wellbeing department, almost a decade before crew mental health became an industry priority, a measure of how early, and how seriously, he took the people behind every voyage.
That conviction, that ships are run by people and that looking after them is how you look after the ship, is the foundation NURA is built on. At NURA, Aga brings a career's worth of it to a deliberately focused fleet, with founder-level attention on every vessel.
Kannan trained as a Marine Engineer in Kolkata, then he went to sea in 1988, rising to Chief Engineer across multiple vessel types, being the person ultimately responsible for everything that keeps a ship moving. Years in the engine room teach a particular kind of knowledge: not what should work in theory, but what actually fails, when, and why, and what it takes to prevent it.
He brought that hands-on grounding ashore to Fleet Management in 2001, where over two decades he rose to Executive Director of the global dry fleet and a member of the board. There he was responsible for the technical management, maintenance and condition of hundreds of vessels, from bulk carriers to crude, product, chemical and gas tankers, and led the firm's oil-and-gas tanker operations.
That is the reality Kannan knows from both ends, the engine room and the boardroom, and it shapes how he sees a fleet. Every vessel as a long-term asset whose value is won or lost in the discipline of how it's maintained. He has worked alongside Aga since the mid-1990s.
At NURA, Kannan leads operations and technical management, bringing deep, first-hand engineering judgement to every decision made on an owner's behalf.
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