Aqua-Spark takes a stake in rope-to-retail seaweed company
Sustainable aquaculture investment fund Aqua-Spark has announced an investment in Sea6 Energy, a vertically integrated seaweed producer, processor and developer headquartered in India with a subsidiary in Indonesia.
Sea6 has developed the proprietary SeaCombine, a fully mechanized cultivation system that can simultaneously harvest and replant seaweed in deep ocean waters, enabling cost competitive production at scale.
Additionally, Sea6 has developed proprietary processing technologies to convert fresh seaweed into novel products for agriculture, animal health, food ingredients, bioplastics and renewable chemicals.
Increased supply
Aqua-Spark is the lead investor in Sea6’s $9 million (£6.49m) Series B round, alongside co-investor Silverstrand Capital, based in Singapore.
The funds will contribute towards the financing of additional SeaCombine systems to increase supply of seaweed raw material and expanding Sea6’s processing capacity with additional production facilities to produce Sea6’s agricultural biostimulant products and animal health products as well as a carrageenan production facility based on an energy efficient and eco-friendly process. Carrageenan is derived from red seaweeds and is widely used in the food industry, mostly as a thickener and gelling agent. It is a vegan alternative to gelatin.
Mike Velings and Amy Novogratz, co-founders of Aqua-Spark, said: “Investing in seaweed production has been a priority for us since we launched in 2015. We expect it to play a big part in the future of aquaculture, but, until now, we hadn’t come upon an operation that was both economically viable and was able to produce at scale.
“Sea6’s first-of-its-kind innovation is well-positioned to impact how we farm seaweed and its utilisation across industries. It gets us much closer to realising algae as a commercial scale aquafeed ingredient and as a direct source of protein for all. Their SeaCombine makes sustainably farming the ocean a possibility, while capturing CO₂ and transforming it into valuable products. The company’s approach impressed us from the start, and we’re eager to integrate them into our portfolio and begin to work together.”
High growth rates
Sea6 was founded in 2010 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) by newly qualified biotechnology graduates Sailaja Nori, Nelson Vadassery and Sowmya Balendiran and Shrikumar Suryanarayan, the former R&D head of India’s largest pharmaceutical company, Biocon.
Suryanarayan, the company’s managing director, said AquaSpark’s approach to sustainability aligned with Sea6's own vision. “At Sea6 Energy, we are focused on cultivating and processing tropical seaweed species which have the advantage of high growth rates, large scalability and year-round availability of biomass.
“This, coupled with the fact that seaweed cultivation is a very sustainable operation, makes this biomass a versatile and ideal raw material that can be used for a variety of industrial purposes to greatly reduce their carbon footprint.”
Reduced labour requirement
Most traditional seaweed production process is labour intensive, and restricted to shallow and calm water areas, so the industry’s major challenge is to cultivate seaweed at a large scale and in an economically viable way.
The SeaCombine reduces the labour intensity required to harvest and seed the seaweed and can do this directly on the sea. In addition, the SeaCombine allows farming in deeper and rougher waters than otherwise possible by traditional methods.
Sea6 has also developed proprietary methods that can stabilise fresh seaweed for long periods of time and process the stored or fresh seaweed directly into a variety of products.
Aqua-Spark has €195m invested in assets under management in 19 companies, not including Sea6. Its investments include stakes in Dundee aquaculture technology company Ace Aquatec, single cell protein producer Calysta, and Norwegian halibut farmer Sogn Aqua.
