Jessica Harvey, Chief Executive Officer, Guy Harvey Foundation

Every fall, I sit in a room full of student founders and watch them pitch solutions to problems most adults haven’t figured out how to solve. A high schooler explaining a low-cost sensor to track coral bleaching. A college team walking a panel through a prototype for cleaner ballast water. It’s the kind of afternoon that resets my sense of what’s possible for our oceans, and it’s become one of the highlights of my year as CEO of the Guy Harvey Foundation. 

The Guy Harvey Foundation (GHF) has partnered with Ocean Exchange for five years, and each year the relationship has deepened. Ocean Exchange is a global ecosystem built to speed up the adoption of workable solutions for healthy oceans and a sustainable blue economy. Now in its 14th year, Ocean Exchange has distributed more than $2.9 million in grants to early-stage, mostly pre-revenue startups; the kind of funding that turns a promising idea into reality.

Each fall, Ocean Exchange runs its main awards program, three global prizes worth $100,000 apiece, alongside a Collegiate Awards track built for earlier-stage student ventures and a high school scholar award that recognizes outstanding concept, design and execution of solutions to conservation issues by high school students using Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and/or Math.

The GHF sponsors prizes in both the collegiate and high school categories, and most years, my team and I sit on the judging panel.

What the Students Teach Me

High schoolers show up with working solutions to problems that stump people twice their age. College teams bring prototypes built to hold up in real field conditions. Several past finalists have gone on to land spots on Forbes 30 Under 30, and it’s easy to see why once you’ve watched them present.

Building the Ecosystem Together

Conservation doesn’t move forward on good intentions alone. It moves forward when young innovators get funding, a stage, and a network willing to open doors for them. That’s what Ocean Exchange builds, and it’s why the GHF continues to support the incredible platform they provide.

This year’s event runs October 25-27 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I encourage you to share the link to register for the Collegiate Awards with someone you think has the next big idea in ocean conservation. The deadline to register is September 16th.

Link: https://www.f6s.com/2026-ocean-exchange-collegiate-awards/

About the Author: Jessica Harvey is Chief Executive Officer of the Guy Harvey Foundation, where she leads the organization’s work in ocean conservation through research, education, and partnerships across the blue economy.

Preferred Contact: info@guyharveyfoundation.org

Website: https://www.guyharveyfoundation.org

The post BLOG: Backing the Next Generation of Ocean Innovators appeared first on Ocean Exchange.

When tourism in Southeast Asia came to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating economic struggle, many coastal communities found resilience in a tradition that’s deeply rooted in the region’s recent history: seaweed cultivation. With its applications in food, biostimulants, animal feed, and more, seaweed farming allowed the locals to diversify their sources of income beyond tourism, fishing, and land agriculture. Since we began investing in the sector three years ago, we’ve had the inspiring opportunity to visit seaweed farms in Indonesia and the Philippines, where we witnessed seaweed’s impact on sustaining the livelihoods of farmers on the ground.

We met Agus, whose father, I Made Simbik, was among the pioneers of seaweed farming in Indonesia after the practice was brought there from the Philippines in the 1970s. Agus now leads Indonesian farm operations at Sea6 Energy, which develops sustainable, seaweed-based solutions for agricultural production and climate resilience. We also paid a visit to Coast 4C, where smallholder seaweed farmers are making a transition to more sustainable, regenerative farming in the Philippines—effectively protecting marine ecosystems while improving their practice with better-quality seedlings and science-based guidance.

For these farmers, seaweed is more than a source of income: it’s their way of building a sustainable livelihood for themselves and coastal generations to come. The potential for impact is only one of the reasons why Potato Impact Partners invests in seaweed companies in Southeast Asia.

Potato Impact Partners is a Singapore-based impact investor focused on seaweed innovation and the blue economy. We see ourselves as the bridge to Southeast Asia and work to generate more capital flows and collaboration in this region that is ripe for potential and opportunity.

Coastal communities in Southeast Asia contribute to nearly a third of the world’s seaweed production. The region has massive scaling potential, thanks to extensive coastlines spanning 170,000–180,000 kilometers and about 70% of the population living along the coast. Despite growing momentum and supportive policy developments in parts of Southeast Asia, several structural challenges continue to slow the growth of the blue economy. Drawing on our experience in the seaweed value chain, we highlight some catalysts needed to unlock and scale the region’s blue economy.

Evolving Financing Models

Startups in Southeast Asia often don’t fit traditional venture capital models – which relies on 10x returns over a 7-10 year time horizon – because that framework was built for asset-light software companies. This is very clear in the case of seaweed startups.

These businesses are frequently capex-heavy and require longer commercialization timelines. Equipment and manufacturing are not capital light, and working with biology takes time.

We need to evolve financing models and look beyond equity to alternative forms of capital such as blended finance. This could include debt to purchase equipment or working capital, given the seasonality of the seaweed business, which are more suitable types of financing vehicles that don’t dilute the founders.

Intentional, patient capital is not optional—it is the foundational structure that this industry requires.

Research and Knowledge Gaps

Despite Southeast Asia’s large production capacity, significant gaps remain in localized research and technical infrastructure. Much of the global innovation ecosystem for seaweed—including R&D funding, advanced processing technologies, and intellectual property development—is still concentrated in Europe and North America. Meanwhile, many producers in Southeast Asia continue to face limited access to climate-resilient solutions, disease management, technical training and scientific data. 

Building stronger regional knowledge ecosystems through partnerships between startups, universities, governments, and coastal communities will be critical to unlocking innovation that is tailored to local market realities in the Southeast Asian blue economy. 

Fragmented Infrastructure

The aquaculture and seaweed supply chain in Southeast Asia also remains highly fragmented. 

In the case of seaweed, complex intermediary networks within the value chain contribute to price volatility and reduce margins for farmers and coastal producers. There is also limited access to hatcheries, climate-resilient seedlings, and processing infrastructure. While production capacity exists, value-added processing and downstream commercialization are still developing.

Future regional growth will be accelerated by reducing this fragmentation through solutions such as end-to-end traceability, ensuring that smallholder farmers are integrated into the supply chain, rather than excluded from it, as well as more processing in the region. 

Building the Ecosystem

Capital alone doesn’t build markets—ecosystems do. Through collaborative action, we can truly scale the blue economy in Southeast Asia.

At Potato Impact Partners, we lead programs and initiatives to bring stakeholders together for learning and engagement. This includes our biannual Seaweed Squad Investors Call, leading working groups in coalitions such as 1000 Ocean Startups, and helping organize learning activities, such as a recent seaweed study tour to South Korea. We also participate in knowledge sharing when possible, such as through our whitepaper, speaking on industry panels, and sharing investment notes and diligence with co-investors.

Through our capital, we send a market signal that what we invest in matters. Through our time and collaboration, we can build partnerships across various stakeholders to strengthen the entire value chain. 

About the Author: Tessa Charupatanapongse is Investment Lead at Potato Impact Partners, an impact investor spurring positive contributions to food security, climate action, and the resilience of coastal communities through investments in sustainable seaweed innovation. Tessa leads deal sourcing and due diligence and drives ecosystem building within the sustainable seaweed aquaculture value chain.

Preferred Contact: hello@potatoimpactpartners.com

Website: https://www.potatoimpactpartners.com/

The post BLOG: Catalyzing the Blue Economy in Southeast Asia: Insights from the Seaweed Value Chain appeared first on Ocean Exchange.

Africa’s blue economy is often framed as “untapped potential.” That’s true—but increasingly incomplete. Across the continent, a new wave of entrepreneurs is moving beyond promise into performance: building investable solutions in aquaculture and blue foods, circular materials, coastal resilience, ocean data and monitoring, maritime services, and nature-positive livelihoods. The question is no longer whether Africa has blue economy opportunity. The question is how quickly we can connect these solutions to the markets, partners, and capital that help them scale.

From OceanHub Africa’s vantage point, the most exciting shift is the rise of founders who understand both local realities and global ocean challenges. These are not abstract climate solutions designed at a distance. They are grounded responses to practical needs: reducing post-harvest losses in fisheries, strengthening coastal supply chains, improving traceability and compliance, restoring ecosystems, and creating dignified jobs for coastal communities under growing climate pressure.

This matters because Africa’s ocean economy sits at the intersection of some of the world’s most urgent transitions—food security, biodiversity protection, climate adaptation, circularity, renewable energy, and digital monitoring. Coastal and island communities are often on the front line of climate impacts. They are also close to many of the solutions. When entrepreneurship is properly supported, the blue economy can shift from extraction and vulnerability toward resilience, productivity, and regeneration.

Yet the obstacle is rarely a lack of entrepreneurs. It is the gap between early innovation and the conditions required to scale. Many African startups operate in markets where infrastructure is uneven, customers are fragmented, procurement cycles are slow, and quality data is hard to access. Investors can be cautious—especially when go-to-market pathways are unfamiliar. Founders often need more than funding: they need technical and commercial support, trusted partnerships, regulatory navigation, credible impact measurement, and targeted help to become “investment-ready” or supplier-ready for larger customers.

That is why OceanHub Africa exists: to support, connect, and invest in Africa’s ocean-impact ecosystem. Since 2020, we have worked with startups and local ecosystem actors across the continent to strengthen the pipeline of investable blue economy ventures. Our role is to help founders move from promising innovation to credible, resilient businesses—while also building the broader ecosystem around them.

We are also encouraged by the growing global interest in African blue innovation. But interest must be matched with instruments that fit early-stage realities in emerging markets: non-dilutive awards, catalytic and blended finance, patient capital, and partnerships that reduce market-entry risk.

Initiatives such as Ocean Exchange’s 2026 Call for Solutions are especially valuable for African innovators ready to step onto a global stage. Ocean Exchange is not only an awards programme—it is a global ecosystem with a mission to accelerate the adoption of innovative solutions for healthy oceans and a sustainable blue economy. 

My message to African blue economy entrepreneurs is simple: the world needs your solutions, and now is the time to be visible. Apply, tell your story with confidence, pursue partnerships that accelerate adoption, and help prove that Africa is not only a beneficiary of ocean innovation—it is one of its most important frontiers.

About the Author: Alexis Grosskopf is the Founder of OceanHub Africa, a Cape Town-based ecosystem builder supporting, connecting and investing in Africa’s ocean-impact entrepreneurship ecosystem. OceanHub Africa works with startups, coastal communities, investors and partners to accelerate sustainable and inclusive blue economy solutions across the continent.

Preferred contact: contact@oceanhub.africa
Website: www.oceanhub.africa

The post BLOG: Africa’s Blue Economy Is Ready for Investment-Grade Innovation appeared first on Ocean Exchange.

Iluminar el Mar Update – April 2026

Iluminar el Mar is a socially and economically sustainable bycatch reduction solution. Bycatch threatens endangered species like turtles and sharks. The solution is to use the differences in visual abilities between the target fish of fisheries, and other animals. Fishers tested lights in Ecuador’s gillnet fishery, cutting bycatch up to 73%.

“Since the transformational funding provided by the Ocean Exchange and Guy Harvey Foundation, project Iluminar el Mar, led by The Leatherback Project and the Mare Nostrum Foundation, has made great strides. We used the funding to support Phase II of Iluminar el Mar, a scientific research and conservation project to test and implement bycatch reduction technology in the artisanal gillnet fishery in Ecuador to protect threatened and endangered species groups such as sharks, rays, cetaceans, and marine turtles. The fishers requested trialing a new light placement for Phase II, and we have now conducted 72% of the required Phase II trials. We were able to onboard two new fishing crews to join the team as well, through purchasing lights for their vessels and training them in our data collection protocols. After completing Phase II trials, we hope to continue expanding our fishing team to increase the number of turtles, elasmobranchs and cetaceans protected each month.”

~ Callie Veelenturf, COO & Project Manager, Iluminar el Mar
University of Central Florida

Ignition Packaging Update – April 2026

Ignition Packaging is biodegradable, ocean-safe packaging that replaces the top contributors to marine pollution. The cellulose-based materials are strong, cost-competitive, and compatible with existing manufacturing.

“Since winning the Ocean Exchange Collegiate Competition, Ignition Packaging has accelerated the development of our cellulose-based biofoam technology made from agricultural residues, aimed at replacing Styrofoam/petroleum-based protective packaging. We have further refined our formulation to improve structural stability, integrability, and biodegradability, with early prototypes successfully demonstrating prolonged shelf life and real-world performance in small-scale production.

On the commercialization side, we’ve advanced discussions with agricultural partners for consistent feedstock sourcing and continued building early customer interest for our compostable foam alternative, including multiple LOIs. We have also strengthened product validation to further demonstrate functional application and durability.

This support has meaningfully helped us move faster from lab-stage iteration toward pilot-ready material development and early market validation while also connecting us to a broader community of innovators and partners advancing practical solutions for environmental resilience at scale.”

~ Abdurrahman Bejjaj, CEO of Ignition Packaging
University of Florida

OctaPulse Update – April 2026

OctaPulse is an AI-powered Inspection platform to automate production in early stage finfish aquaculture. Designed for hatcheries and the early land-based part of production, the system uses computer vision and commercially available hardware to identify deformities, estimate weight, and improve egg/stock quality with over 90% accuracy in early pilots.

“Over the past five months, OctaPulse has made strong progress advancing our AI-powered computer vision platform for aquaculture. We were accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, which has accelerated both product development and customer traction. We also signed a paid development partnership with Riverence, the largest trout producer in the United States, to deploy and refine our phenotyping and deformity inspection platform in commercial hatchery operations.

In addition, OctaPulse received the ACME SICA innovation award, which has supported pilot deployments and data collection across multiple species. Our system automates manual quality inspection workflows, reducing inspection time from minutes per fish to under 30 seconds while delivering over 90% model accuracy.

We are now beginning our seed fundraising round to scale deployments and expand globally.”

~ Paul L. Grech, Co-Founder & CEO of OctaPulse
Carnegie Mellon University

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The deep ocean is Earth’s largest and least understood ecosystem. It regulates climate, supports biodiversity, and underpins emerging sectors of the blue economy – yet it remains largely inaccessible to humanity. Orpheus Ocean was founded to change that reality. Winning the Ocean Exchange Neptune Award is an affirmation that scalable, responsible access to the deep sea is not only technologically possible, but essential to the future health of our oceans.

At the heart of Orpheus Ocean’s work is a simple idea: before you can protect the deep sea, you must first understand it. Today, much of the deep ocean is a data vacuum. Traditional approaches to deep exploration rely on large research vessels, tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and highly specialized crews. These methods are slow, expensive, and inherently unscalable. As a result, environmental baselines are often sparse, monitoring campaigns are infrequent, and decision-making is forced to rely on limited snapshots of dynamic ecosystems.

Orpheus Ocean addresses this gap by enabling routine, autonomous access to deep benthic environments. Our autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are small, agile, and cost-effective, yet capable of operating at extreme depths for extended periods. Unlike conventional AUVs, Orpheus vehicles are designed to fly close to the seafloor, land, and collect physical samples, with the ability to also remain in place for long-duration monitoring. This capability transforms how ocean data can be gathered – shifting from episodic expeditions to persistent presence.

The Ocean Exchange Neptune Award recognizes solutions that advance ocean understanding while delivering tangible benefits to marine ecosystems and human communities, and we at Orpheus Ocean are honored to be one of the 2025 recipients. By dramatically lowering the cost and complexity of deep-sea data collection, we enable scientists to expand spatial and temporal coverage, revealing patterns in biodiversity, chemistry, and geology that were previously invisible. Our platforms support tools such as high-resolution optical imaging, environmental DNA sampling, sediment coring, and chemical sensing: methods that provide direct insight into ecosystem health and resilience.

This data has real-world impact. Governments and regulators depend on accurate environmental assessments to protect sensitive habitats. Offshore industries, from seabed minerals to wind energy to subsea cables, require immense amounts of data to plan projects, minimize disturbance, and ensure compliance. Climate researchers need better observations of deep-ocean processes that influence carbon cycling and long-term climate stability. In each case, better data leads to better decisions, reduced risk, and more resilient oceans.

Equally important is how the data is collected. Orpheus Ocean was built around a strong ethical framework: we prioritize transparency, scientific integrity, and environmental stewardship. Our vehicles are quiet, low-impact, and designed to reduce reliance on large vessels. When we work with industry, it is explicitly to improve oversight, minimize harm, and bring light to activities that would otherwise occur in darkness.

The Neptune Award is meaningful not just as recognition of a single technology, but as validation of a broader shift in how humanity engages with the ocean. Scalable autonomy allows us to move from exploration as an exception to observation as a norm. With better tools, deeper understanding, and shared responsibility, the deep ocean can move from mystery to monitored – supporting healthier marine ecosystems and a robust blue economy for generations to come. We are currently planning for H2 2026: if you have deep ocean access needs, or would like to join our mission, please reach out.

About the Author: Dr. Jake Russell is the CEO and co-founder of Orpheus Ocean. Orpheus Ocean spun out from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where Russell led a venture studio in his prior role as Operating Partner with Propeller Ventures. Previously, Russell was a Fellow at ARPA-E in the Department of Energy, where he specialized in ocean technologies and helped launch three $10M+ funding programs. He holds a PhD in materials chemistry from Columbia University and a BS from the University of Chicago.

Contact: jake@orpheusocean.com

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What if we lived in a fully circular world where plastic pollution never enters the ocean—and instead becomes valuable materials?

Over 400 million tons of new plastic is produced globally each year, and roughly 90% isn’t recycled. This isn’t necessarily because of lack of effort; many plastics are simply incompatible with today’s recycling systems. As a result, plastic waste leaks into waterways, fragments into microplastics, and impacts marine ecosystems and human health.

Why Hasn’t the Global Plastic Waste Problem Been Solved Yet?

The core challenge is economic. Conventional approaches take a low-value input (plastic waste) and produce a low-value output (degraded plastic or fuel/oils), making it difficult to incentivize collection and processing at scale. To build a truly circular economy, we need pathways that upcycle plastic into something more valuable.

That’s the fundamental problem Cecilia is solving. Our microwave-based process transforms hard-to-recycle plastic into clean hydrogen and advanced carbons—turning waste into value. The hydrogen can self-power our reactors. On the carbon side, Cecilia produces advanced materials including carbon nanotubes and graphitic carbon that can be used as high-performance additives.

Cecilia’s first commercial focus is nanocarbon additives because they can deliver meaningful performance improvements at low loadings. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes are over 100x stronger than steel and offer exceptional conductivity and heat absorption properties, enabling stronger, lighter, and more durable end products across automotive, aerospace, and other industrial applications. Especially relevant to Ocean Exchange’s community, Cecilia is partnering with a leading polymer institute to explore development of a marine anti-fouling coating that leverages advanced carbon additives as an alternative to traditional metal-based coatings that can leach toxins into the ocean.

Looking Ahead

Cecilia is rapidly scaling commercial operations and is engaging strategic partners to support this next phase of expansion. If you are an investor or customer exploring circular nanocarbon additives that deliver environmental impact without sacrificing price or performance, please reach out to continue the conversation.

Contact Cecilia

Contact Kathryn and the Cecilia team at info@ceciliaenergy.com. To learn more, visit Cecilia’s LinkedIn page and website, www.ceciliaenergy.com

The post Cecilia Is Transforming Plastic Into Circular Carbon Nanomaterials appeared first on Ocean Exchange.

Despite decades of progress in ocean science, one fundamental challenge remains unresolved: the ocean is still largely unmeasured at biological resolution. While we monitor temperature, currents, and chemistry at scale, understanding how marine life behaves, grows, and responds to environmental change remains expensive, fragmented, and limited in scope. This biological data gap constrains sustainable aquaculture, ecosystem management, and our ability to anticipate environmental stress before irreversible damage occurs.

At NeuralX, we are closing this gap by transforming underwater video into quantitative biological intelligence. Our core innovation is a patented artificial life simulation engine that models fish morphology, biomechanics, and behavior under physically realistic environmental conditions. This engine enables us to generate large-scale, high-fidelity synthetic datasets that train AI systems to interpret underwater imagery with a level of robustness that real-world data alone cannot achieve.

Rather than relying only on historical footage — which is sparse, biased, and difficult to collect — our approach simulates how fish move, grow, school, feed, and respond to stress across a wide range of environmental scenarios. These simulations are grounded in physics and biology, allowing our AI to infer biomass, population counts, appetite, stress, and early disease signals from non-contact video feeds. The result is a system that can “see” underwater ecosystems quantitatively, without disturbing marine life.

This capability delivers immediate environmental and economic benefits. In aquaculture, feed accounts for 50–70% of operating costs and is the largest source of nutrient pollution. By accurately measuring fish biomass and appetite in real time, NeuralX reduces overfeeding by 10–20%, improves feed conversion ratios, and lowers ammonia discharge — directly improving water quality, fish welfare, and farm profitability. Healthier farmed populations also reduce pressure on wild fisheries, strengthening overall ocean resilience.

Beyond aquaculture, the same technology contributes to ocean science and ecosystem monitoring. Fish behavior often serves as an early indicator of environmental stress, such as hypoxia, harmful algal blooms, or temperature anomalies. By converting behavior into structured data, NeuralX enables earlier detection of ecosystem change and supports more adaptive, science-driven management of coastal and freshwater systems.

The Neptune Award meaningfully accelerates this mission. The funding supports expanded deployments, refinement of species-specific models, and large-scale synthetic data generation for rare or extreme conditions that are difficult to observe in the field. It also enables deeper collaboration with researchers, producers, and technology partners to ensure our data outputs are scientifically valid, operationally trusted, and broadly useful.

As NeuralX scales, we are actively raising venture capital to expand our simulation infrastructure, grow strategic partnerships, and accelerate global deployment. We are particularly interested in working with partners across aquaculture, sensing, cloud computing, and ocean science to build a shared biological data layer for the ocean.

Ultimately, NeuralX is not just building better AI — we are building the biological data infrastructure for the ocean. By making underwater life measurable at scale, we aim to enable healthier marine ecosystems, more resilient food systems, and a deeper scientific understanding of the living ocean.

Masaki Nakada is the Founder and CEO of NeuralX, an AI company building artificial life simulation and synthetic data infrastructure for ocean and aquaculture intelligence. He holds a Master’s degree in Physics from Waseda University and a PhD and Postdoctoral fellowship in Computer Science from UCLA, where he specialized in biomechanical and physics-based simulation. Over the past decade, his work has focused on modeling complex living systems using computer graphics, AI, and physical simulation.

In 2019, Masaki founded NeuralX to commercialize proprietary IP from his research, applying artificial life simulation to generate high-fidelity synthetic datasets for training underwater AI systems. NeuralX’s technology enables accurate, non-contact measurement of fish biomass, behavior, and health to improve sustainability and efficiency in aquaculture and ocean monitoring.

Masaki has been recognized as a MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 honoree, Forbes Next 1000, and recipient of the Hongo AI Award. NeuralX is also the recipient of the Ocean Exchange Neptune Award, recognizing technologies with the potential to create lasting positive impact on ocean health and the blue economy.

Contact: masaki@neuralx.ai
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/masakinakada/

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