🏞️ The Great Lakes blue economy tops $1 trillion, new report finds

We usually focus on the ocean when talking about the blue economy, but the Great Lakes tell a different story worth paying attention to. A new report from RTI International, commissioned by water innovation nonprofit Current, found that the Great Lakes region supports $1 trillion in GDP and 6.9 million jobs across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, accounting for 25% of the region's total economic output and 17% of national blue economy employment.

The region also punches above its weight on innovation, holding 23% of U.S. water-related patents over the past decade despite representing a smaller share of overall patent filings, with particular strength in wastewater treatment and separation technologies. From 2015 to 2025, 237 venture-backed water companies in the region raised $1.3 billion, and wages in the water sector run 37% above state averages.

Read the article.

⚒️ WWF shares guidance on building sustainable ocean infrastructure

A new pair of reports from the World Wildlife Fund lays out what a nature-positive approach to blue economy infrastructure actually looks like across four key sectors: offshore wind, coastal tourism, shipping, and ports. The core argument is that site selection is the most consequential decision in any development project, and that placing infrastructure away from protected areas, key biodiversity zones, and sensitive habitats like mangroves, seagrass beds, and coral reefs is the single highest-leverage action available.

Beyond siting, the reports offer sector-specific guidance on reducing operational impacts, restoring degraded ecosystems nearby, and transforming broader systems through policy and financing. With $151 trillion in global infrastructure investment required by 2050 to support the clean energy transition and transportation resilience, the reports argue that the window to build this right, rather than retrofit it later, is open now but not indefinitely.

Read the report.

🪸 Florida awards $935K for research missions inside DEEP’s undersea habitat

Florida has awarded $935,000 to support up to six university and research institution teams to live and work aboard Vanguard, DEEP's pilot underwater habitat deployed at Tennessee Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Each team will complete a five-day mission between November 2026 and June 2027, with research focused on two priority areas: reef restoration and environmental monitoring, and human-machine collaboration.

The distinction the program is built around is time at depth. A researcher spending five days inside a saturation habitat observes reef conditions in a fundamentally different way than one making hourly dives, and that sustained access is what Florida is funding. Proposals are due September 1, 2026.

Read the announcement.

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Brooke Lynn Elzweig has a name for the space where that stalling happens. She calls it the brackish zone, and she built Brackish Strategies specifically to meet companies there. Named after the estuarine mixing ground where salt and fresh water converge, the brackish zone is ecologically one of the most productive environments on earth precisely because of the confluence. Brackish operates on the same logic.

Brooke is an environmental engineer by training, a marine scientist and restoration practitioner by field experience, and a business strategist by necessity. She founded Brackish Strategies in November 2025 from her base in Delray Beach and has already expanded client work globally. The firm is a boutique strategic advisory supporting ventures across coastal resilience and blue infrastructure, water systems and resource infrastructure, and climate-enabling materials and industrial decarbonization.

Her core thesis is that every industry eventually drains to the sea. Brooke's argument, shaped by years working across federally funded projects and privately financed marine work, is that the bottleneck is not innovation or ingenuity. It's access to capital, customers, and strategic partners. More specifically, it's the translation layer between them.

I sat down with Brooke to talk through what that gap actually looks like, why it persists, and what it would take to close it.

Blue Tide: The valley of death is a concept that exists across deep tech, but what makes ocean tech specifically harder to move through than other sectors?

Brooke Lynn Elzweig: Out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, that’s the simplest way I can put it. Land-based technologies are accessible… you can visit a factory, touch a product, watch a field trial. The ocean is remote by definition, expensive to operate in, and nearly impossible to demonstrate in a conference room. That physical inaccessibility creates an epistemic gap for investors who haven’t spent time on or in the water.

But the harder structural problem is that ocean tech doesn’t fit cleanly into any existing investment category. It’s not cleanly climate, not cleanly infrastructure, nor cleanly biotech. It touches all of them and maps neatly onto none of them. So when an ocean founder walks into a room with a generalist investor, the first challenge isn’t the technology, but it’s the vocabulary. Investors pattern-match against things they already know. Ocean tech doesn’t match any of those patterns yet, and that mismatch is where momentum dies before it ever starts.

BT: You work with ventures that are technically de-risked but still struggling to close funding. What does that look like from the inside?

Brooke: From what I’ve seen, it looks like a founder who has done everything right and still can’t get a term sheet. They have peer-reviewed validation, a working prototype, a pilot with a municipality or government agency, letters of intent, etc. On paper, they’re exactly what an investor should want, but the commercial narrative hasn’t caught up with the technical progress. They can tell you precisely how the technology works but struggle to answer why this market, why now, and why them in a way that lands with someone whose primary question is what is my path to return. The technology is de-risked, but the story isn’t.

There’s also a relationship problem that I’ve seen. Ocean founders tend to be embedded in scientific and research communities, not investor networks. So when the time comes to raise, they’re starting from cold outreach rather than warm relationships built over years. The funding gap is real, but the access gap underneath it is just as significant. Relationships matter!

BT: Most ocean founders come from science and engineering backgrounds. Where does the breakdown happen when they start talking to capital providers?

Brooke: It’s funny… I got my engineering degree and I’ve watched this play out since my undergraduate days. Scientists and engineers think in detail. They’re trained to lead with how something works, to qualify their claims, and to present the complexity with integrity. That’s exactly what makes good science. They’re problem solvers and think in processes.

But investors need to hear the market before they hear the mechanism. They want to know: What’s the size of the opportunity? Who’s paying for this today? Why is now the right moment? Those questions have to come first, and most technical founders reach them about fifteen minutes into a pitch rather than just opening with those numbers.

There’s also something else I’ve noticed. Investors invest in the founder, not the solution. Integrity and competence matter a lot. There’s no shortage of big ideas in the ocean space, and honestly, a whole lot of vaporware. What investors are really hunting for is someone who thinks differently, sees something others have missed, and is solving a problem that’s genuinely real… with the unit economics and market validation to back it up.

BT: There are more ocean-focused funds now than there were five years ago. Does that mean the gap is closing?

Brooke: I think it means the market is finally starting to prove itself. I mean, S2G Investments just closed a $1 billion fund with ocean systems as a named pillar. Backed by pension funds, family offices, and institutional investors across four continents. That’s not a niche bet anymore; that’s a signal. The ocean is becoming a serious investment theme, not just a mission-driven one or a way for corporates to clear their ESG conscience.

But more funds and a closing gap are two different things. Less than 2% of the $550 billion in annual investment needed for a sustainable ocean economy was actually deployed in 2023. So the infrastructure for capital is being built, but the volume flowing through it is still a fraction of what the sector requires.

The real question, though, is whether these ventures can actually prove returns for LPs. The capital is starting to show up, but now the companies actually have to perform. That’s the next chapter, and honestly, the most important one. If the early cohort of well-funded ocean ventures delivers, the floodgates open. But if they don’t, this moment backpedals. The market has proven itself enough to attract serious capital, but now it has to prove itself enough to keep it.

BT: If you could change one structural thing about how ocean ventures get funded, what would it be?

Brooke: I’d change the taxonomy around ocean investment. How ocean ventures get categorized by capital providers has downstream effects on everything from due diligence to return expectations to which investors even see the deal.

Right now, ocean investment gets sorted into an ESG or impact bucket by default. That triggers a different type of investor relationship, a different set of return expectations, and often a fundamentally different conversation than a company building coastal infrastructure or water technology should be having. These are real assets with real revenue and markets. The ocean is not a cause; it’s an economy (and a big one, at that).

When a marine construction platform or a coastal resilience company gets evaluated through the same lens as a donation to a conservation nonprofit, the conversation starts in the wrong place and almost always ends there too. Fix the taxonomy and you fix the routing: which investors see these deals, how they evaluate them, and what kind of capital actually shows up. That single shift would unlock more momentum than any new fund or blended finance mechanism could on its own.

The over-reliance on political and federal funding cycles is real too, and it’s a related problem. When the baseline assumption is that ocean ventures need a government grant to survive their early years, it signals to private capital that these businesses aren’t investable on their own terms. Breaking that assumption starts with changing how the sector gets categorized and who gets invited into the room to fund it.

Brooke works with ventures in what she describes as the growth-stage sweet spot: companies with real traction, often in the $5 to $50 million revenue range, that haven’t yet broken through to broader institutional visibility. They’re investable but often invisible.

If that sounds like your company, or if you’re a capital provider looking to better understand the space, reach out to Brooke at brooke@brackishstrategies.com or visit brackishstrategies.com.

This article is part of a spotlight series on Blue Tide, which tells a deeper story about the people and solutions shaping the blue economy. If you know someone who would like to be featured then send me an email.

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🪸 Kind Designs closes $10M round to scale 3D-printed living seawalls

Miami-based Kind Designs set out to raise $5 million and ended up closing a $10 million Pre-Series A at a $70 million valuation. The round was backed by Mark Cuban, NBA forward Kyle Kuzma, former Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, and several angel funds. The company makes 3D-printed seawalls designed to dissipate wave energy and function as marine habitat rather than the traditional concrete structures that erode over time and degrade the ecosystems around them.

The funding follows a breakout year for Kind Designs, which went from $1 million in revenue in 2025 to $10 million in contracted work and a $175 million active pipeline. Clients now include the Fontainebleau and Ritz-Carlton in Miami Beach, alongside municipal projects and a recently awarded $2 million U.S. Navy contract. Miami-Dade County rewrote its seawall codes to offer permitting discounts and mitigation exemptions for the company’s systems, and Governor DeSantis signed legislation directing the state to create further incentives for living seawall adoption.

Read the press release.

Watch the announcement.

🇳🇱 The Dutch navy is testing a fleet of uncrewed vessels and drones

The Royal Netherlands Navy is running a five-week mission off the coast of Den Helder to test a coordinated system of uncrewed boats, underwater vehicles, and drones operating together with minimal human input. The setup centers on a repurposed offshore vessel that now serves as a testing base, deploying carbon-fiber drones, autonomous surface vessels called Defenders, and an undersea mine-mapping robot. The goal is to have uncrewed systems handle more than half of the navy’s work within five years, with crewed ships eventually surrounded by rings of autonomous platforms that manage surveillance, monitoring, and dangerous operations.

The Dutch approach is being watched closely by NATO partners operating in the North and Baltic seas, where maritime security has become a growing priority. Naval analysts describe the Netherlands as punching above its weight in this space, partly because its labor shortage gives it a practical incentive to move faster than larger navies. Human oversight remains built into the system, with commanders emphasizing that a person stays in the decision-making chain for any use of force, and that AI is treated as a tool that works for operators rather than one that thinks for them.

Read the article.

🦞 New England lands $15M NSF award to modernize its seafood industry

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded $15 million to the NSF Seafood Engine in New England, a coalition of seafood companies, tech firms, universities, and government partners across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The funding could grow to $160 million over ten years, and will go toward deploying sensors from fishing vessels and aquaculture farms, funding blue tech companies moving from R&D into commercialization, and building apprenticeship programs for the next generation of industry workers.

New England’s seafood industry accounts for 25% of national seafood value but faces a $20 billion annual trade deficit. The Seafood Engine, led by Portsmouth-based nonprofit NERACOOS, aims to pair the region’s deep industry roots with AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing to strengthen the full supply chain and improve the U.S.’s position in global seafood markets.

Read the article.

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🏦 Deutsche Bank is making the case for the ocean as a long-term investment

Deutsche Bank hosted its 2026 Ocean Summit alongside the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance, bringing together investors, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to examine how private capital can flow toward ocean resilience. Christian Nolting, the bank’s Global Chief Investment Officer, framed the ocean as central infrastructure for global trade, energy, and economic stability. Builders Vision’s Chief Strategy Officer Lisa Forbes went further, describing the shift to a regenerative blue economy as one of the most significant long-term financial opportunities of this generation.

The recurring message was that the capital exists, but the structures to deploy it at scale do not yet. Deutsche Bank’s Head of Sustainable Finance Esra Turk pointed to the need for clearer frameworks and a stronger pipeline of scalable opportunities to move blue finance from pilot projects into mainstream allocation. Several companies were highlighted as ventures already bridging that gap, including Matter, which captures microplastics before they enter waterways, ABALOBI, a digital platform supporting small-scale fishers, and DRIFT Energy, which produces green hydrogen at sea.

Read the article here.

🌺 U.S. Congress reaffirms bipartisan support for Sea Grant, with Hawaii securing $2.4M

A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Congress has extended funding for the National Sea Grant College Program through 2026, reaffirming federal commitment to coastal resilience, sustainable seafood, and ocean workforce development. The program, established in 1966, operates through a network of 34 university-based programs across coastal and Great Lakes states and territories, including Guam and Puerto Rico.

Hawaii’s congressional delegation secured roughly $2.4 million of that funding for the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, which bridges academic research and community action on issues including coral restoration, aquaculture, and coastal hazard preparedness. The allocation was championed by Senator Brian Schatz, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Representative Ed Case, who called the program a decades-long model for sustainable coastal development and climate resilience.

Read the article here.

🌿 Baltic Sea algae is being turned into a natural fertilizer alternative, with field trials now underway

Fertilizer runoff from golf courses, lawns, and agriculture is one of the main drivers of eutrophication, the process where excess nitrogen and phosphorus strip oxygen from water and suffocate marine ecosystems. The Baltic Sea is one of the most affected bodies of water in the world. The Baltic Biostimulants project, funded by Finland’s Ministry of the Environment, is addressing this by harvesting the algae that eutrophication itself produces and converting it into a plant biostimulant that can replace synthetic fertilizers on golf courses, green areas, and eventually in agriculture.

After a year of lab testing, the team identified a fermentation-based extraction method that performed as well as commercial alternatives in greenhouse trials. Field trials began this spring, with the product now applied to fairways and teeing areas at Hirsala Golf as part of normal course maintenance. The project has a four-year runway and is already attracting interest from municipalities, research institutes, and stakeholders across several European countries, with commercialization in development alongside plans to expand to additional plant species and sectors.

Read the article here.

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The mangrove loss didn’t just harm the coastline. Data from Blueyou, the aquaculture and fishery company behind the Selva Shrimp program, shows it also lowered how much the ponds themselves could produce, and left farmers more exposed to feed and electricity costs.

I spoke with Jonas Walker, General Manager of Blueyou Impact and Head of Aquaculture, about how the program is aiming to reverse that.

A Model Built on Restoration

Blueyou operates through two arms. Blueyou Impact develops and runs the aquaculture and fishery projects on the ground, often starting with grant or philanthropic funding from organizations like IUCN and UNIDO. Blueyou Trading then sells the resulting seafood, with revenue eventually covering the cost of running the program without further outside funding.

Selva Shrimp applies this structure to Integrated Mangrove Aquaculture, a farming method that reintroduces mangrove trees into existing shrimp ponds. The ponds are extensive and low density, with no added feed. Shrimp, crab, and fish grow on whatever the ecosystem itself produces.

That’s exactly why removing mangroves can do even more damage than it looks like on the surface. It strips out the habitat structure the ponds rely on, lowers water quality, and cuts off the natural feed supply that shrimp, crab, and fish depend on. Restoring the mangroves brings all of that back, and the productivity follows with it.

How Mangroves Impact Yield

Blueyou’s data from established Integrated Mangrove Aquaculture ponds shows the scale of that effect. Comparing harvest volumes before and after restoration, total biomass per hectare rose from 431 kilograms to 890, an increase of 106 percent. Individual species gains varied. Wild shrimp rose 275 percent, black tiger shrimp 190 percent, milkfish 80 percent, and mangrove crab 67 percent.

A pond producing several species instead of one also gives farmers a buffer. If, for example, the shrimp market declines, income from crab or fish can absorb part of the loss. Combined with a system that needs no purchased feed or electricity, since ponds are filled and drained using tidal flow instead of pumps, farmers face fewer upfront costs and less exposure to a single commodity price.

Two Decades of Precedent

Blueyou already runs a comparable program in Vietnam, where the model has been active for around two decades across 3,352 farms covering nearly 17,700 hectares. There, government agencies handle reforestation directly, and Blueyou manages the aquaculture side. Kalimantan is structured differently. Because Indonesia’s ponds are on private farmland, restoration happens pond by pond, with Blueyou working directly with farmers through field training and on-site replanting.

The Indonesia program began in 2018 and currently covers roughly 400 hectares of pilot area across 35 participating farmers, with about 280 hectares of mangroves restored so far. Degraded ponds in the region have historically produced two to four times less than comparable systems in Vietnam, a gap Blueyou attributes to a combination of farming practices and the scale of mangrove loss in the area.

Building the Case for Scale

Blueyou’s goals for 2026 through 2030 center on two things. The first is generating reliable data on how Integrated Mangrove Aquaculture affects carbon sequestration, farmer livelihoods, and biodiversity, categories where public data is currently limited. The second is developing a verified blue carbon project covering 5,000 hectares in Kalimantan, intended to attract the financing needed to expand further.

The stated ambition is for Selva Shrimp to function as a reusable blueprint, with data and methodology made publicly available so other project developers can apply it elsewhere. Blueyou estimates the addressable opportunity at around 250,000 hectares of degraded coastal land in Kalimantan alone, and close to a million hectares across Asia, a scale the company says it cannot address on its own.

Learn more at blueyou.com.

This article is part of a spotlight series on Blue Tide, which tells a deeper story about the people and solutions shaping the blue economy. If you know someone who would like to be featured then send me an email.

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🤿 Manta ray tourism generates $311M a year for the Maldives

A new study puts a dollar figure on what manta rays are worth to the Maldives. In 2021, manta ray tourism generated $227.3 million in direct revenue, around 2.6% of national GDP, rising to more than $311 million annually when associated spending like salaries, taxes, and tourism expenditure is included. The industry has grown roughly 380% since 2008 and is now offered by 80% of tourism operators across the country. Researchers estimate the Maldives’ population of around 3,500 reef manta rays could generate $8.6 billion in cumulative tourism revenue over their lifetimes, with individual rays contributing up to $2.6 million each through repeated dive and snorkeling encounters.

The study, led by the Manta Trust and an international team of researchers, was motivated by two linked problems: global manta ray populations are declining and conservation funding has not kept up. The authors call for a greater share of tourism income to be reinvested into protecting key foraging and aggregation sites, improving monitoring of visitor pressure, and developing nationwide management strategies. Manta ray tourism now operates across 95% of the Maldives’ atolls and 92 identified dive and snorkeling sites, but the ecological impact of that scale remains poorly understood.

Read the full study.

🐟 Aquagenesis is building energy-efficient land-based fish farms

Aquagenesis designs and supplies recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), closed-loop land-based facilities that grow fish without access to natural water bodies, chemicals, or antibiotics. The approach makes it theoretically possible to farm any species anywhere, like rainbow trout in Southeast Asia and shrimp in the Middle East. CEO Amit Fischer and CTO Ran Fischer, who brings three decades of engineering experience in water and aquaculture infrastructure, tailor each system to the specific biological and energy requirements of the project.

The company operates globally, with its strongest footprint across Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore, and active projects in Mexico, Africa, and the Caribbean. Aquagenesis also takes on consulting work, often called in to assess projects that have struggled. Amit points to the same pattern in most cases, technically sound facilities let down by operational and management shortfalls rather than bad engineering. It’s a timely challenge to be working on. 2024 was the first year aquaculture surpassed wild capture fisheries in global production, and the gap between protein demand and supply continues to grow.

Learn more about Aquagenesis.

🌊 Sealor secures $1.1M grant to take its coastal flooding tech into the field

Miami-based Sealor has won a $1.1 million National Science Foundation SBIR Phase II award to move its coastal resilience technology from lab validation into field pilots across South Florida. Developed by climate-tech venture studio Nexuma, Sealor addresses a problem that’s mostly invisible until it becomes serious: seawalls, drainage systems, and roads failing from below as water moves through porous ground and erodes the support underneath. Rather than replacing existing structures, Sealor injects behind them and grows limestone-like mineral material inside the ground itself, cutting soil permeability and making it harder for water to push through.

The company recently cut its treatment time from around 12 weeks to 8 to 14 days, a meaningful step toward making the approach practical for municipalities and property owners weighing cost against disruption. Seawalls in South Florida typically last about 15 years, and conventional repairs tend to be costly and invasive. Sealor’s Phase I work validated the technology in lab conditions across porous sand and limestone, and Phase II funding will support real-world pilots. Longer term, Nexuma sees the technology extending to foundation protection, saltwater intrusion mitigation, and groundwater control.

Read the full article.

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Blue Tide was recently mentioned in Inés Mas de la Peña’s piece on how to work in ocean innovation. Highly recommend giving it a read if you or someone you know is interested in this industry. Read here.

🦐 Ecuador's shrimp exports quadrupled in a decade

Hatch Blue recently shared how Ecuador’s shrimp industry has grown fast enough to reshape the global market. Exports more than quadrupled between 2015 and 2025, closing last year at $7.5 billion and making Ecuador the world’s largest shrimp exporter. That growth accelerated sharply once automatic feeding systems started rolling out across farms in 2014, pushing annual export growth from an average of 8.7% to 18% through 2023. Major feed companies have taken notice, building vertically integrated operations in the country.

Ecuador’s scale has also made it a fast-moving test bed for new shrimp farming technology, much of which is being built by Hatch Blue portfolio companies. Minnowtech uses sonar to give farmers real-time visibility into pond populations, Wittaya Aqua benchmarks feed efficiency against real production data, and Hadl and Hedros are developing diagnostics to help farms manage disease risk as stocking densities rise. Hatch Blue is now mapping how shrimp farming is evolving globally to better understand where these lessons can transfer to other regions.

Read more here.

🔬 New tech helped scientists confirm 31 new marine species in days

An international team aboard the research vessel Falkor (too) discovered 31 new marine species during a recent expedition off the coast of Brazil. Identifying a new species usually takes scientists decades, but a new set of tools changed that. Laser-based scanners built non-invasive 3D images of fragile deep-sea animals, while another camera captured fine details the 3D scans missed. Onboard genetic testing let the team confirm each species was genuinely new within days, instead of years.

The expedition also marked a first for ocean research at sea, capturing a 3D image of a single living cell’s internal structure for the first time recorded. The team also used a virtual reality chamber and a microscope that works like a treadmill for tiny organisms, letting them study delicate, jelly-like animals without the damage caused by older collection methods. The work was funded by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s Ocean Shot Research Grant Program.

Read more here.

🌊 Bloomberg Philanthropies commits $260M to push global ocean protection into action

Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $260 million commitment to ocean conservation, bringing its total funding in the space to $635 million. The money supports a global goal known as 30x30, an agreement among countries to protect 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030. So far, countries have set aside roughly 10% of the ocean for protection, but many of those areas still lack the funding, staffing, or enforcement to actually work. This new funding aims to close that gap, including helping establish the first protected areas in international waters, made possible by a the recently enacted High Seas Treaty, and by expanding the use of satellites and AI to track illegal fishing.

The initiative will also fund coral reef restoration, focused on more than 165,000 square kilometers of reef across 71 countries identified as having the best odds of surviving climate change, and will expand its work into new countries including the Marshall Islands, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The funding supports a network of conservation partners, including Global Fishing Watch, Oceana, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Read more here.

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The United Nations states that all sources combined, including public, philanthropic, and private, deliver less than 1% of global climate and biodiversity finance to the ocean, which is $3 billion against an estimated need of $175 billion a year.

For a foundation or a government donor, that number is the whole argument. It signals urgency, and urgency is what philanthropic capital responds to.

A venture investor or a debt underwriter hears something different. For them, “underfunded” reads as “unproven.” A sector that’s pulled in less than 1% of a massive global pool, after years of attention, looks like a sector smarter money already passed on. Private capital rarely wants to go first, and a scarcity stat with no context gives it a reason to keep waiting.

I spent years in marketing and communications across private credit, index funds, and venture capital, so this reaction doesn’t surprise me. It’s the same instinct behind a lender wanting three years of cash flow before discussing terms. A large part of the job is being cautious.

The part the 1% framing leaves out is that it’s a snapshot of capital raised to date, and says nothing about where that capital is headed next. Trajectory is what allocators price.

Start with how load-bearing the ocean already is. Around 80% of world trade moves by sea. Nearly 99% of international internet traffic runs through undersea cables, the infrastructure carrying every bank transfer and video call between continents.

Plus, seafood supplies roughly 20% of animal protein intake for more than 3 billion people. By the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's accounting, the ocean economy was worth $2.6 trillion in 2020, large enough that if it were a country, it would rank as the fifth largest economy on the planet.

Much of the infrastructure running that economy is clunky, outdated, and unsustainable, which is where the opportunity sits.

A few fund managers are already positioning for it. Ocean 14 Capital closed its fund at €201 million for aquaculture and fisheries tech. A new $75 million Asia Ocean Fund, co-managed by Katapult Ocean, launched last fall to close the early-stage gap across the region. Aqua-Spark recently closed the first $48 million of an Africa-focused aquaculture fund. Propeller Ventures closed its debut fund above $118 million. Redstone Nordics opened a fund this year aimed at Baltic shipping, subsea cables, and offshore renewables.

These are early signals. Most funds are too new to have a meaningful track record of returning capital, even if annual reports point to real traction. Plus a track record of distributions does more for a category than one deploying capital, so the next wave of allocators will be watching exits more than fund announcements.

Capital also doesn't always need an ocean story to find its way into the industry. It can follow demands that already exist, and a growing share of that demand happens to run through ocean infrastructure.

For example, subsea cables are getting funded by AI infrastructure’s hunger for more bandwidth, and offshore wind is funded by grids that need more power. Neither investment thesis was written with the ocean in mind, but the ocean increasingly sits in the path of the capital anyway.

Policy adds another layer. A carbon removal certification framework, a fishing subsidy reform, or a subsea cable security mandate creates demand across an entire category at once. That kind of structural shift tends to move allocators faster than any individual pitch deck.

On the public markets side, the UNCW Blue Economy Index has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past year. It's a short window and worth watching rather than treating as settled, but it's another data point in the same direction as the fund closes.

None of this erases the 1% stat. It's still true, and it does real work in a philanthropic pitch. But aimed at private capital, it tells only half the story.

The fund closes, the infrastructure demand, and the early public market signals tell the other half, the part about where it's headed.

This article is part of a new spotlight series on Blue Tide, which tells a deeper story about the people, solutions and topics shaping the ocean economy. If you know someone who would like to be featured then send me an email.

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🇨🇦 AtlantiCan Growth Partners launches with $100M+ target for blue economy fund

AtlantiCan Growth Partners (AGP) launched today as a long-term investment platform built to close Atlantic Canada’s growth capital gap. The Halifax-based firm runs an operator-led model, partnering with founders and operators in sectors where the region holds a strong global position, including aquaculture, marine technology, fisheries, and ocean innovation. Atlantic Canada has drawn just 2% to 3% of national venture capital over the past five years, with most deployment going to Ontario and Quebec.

AGP plans to launch three dedicated funds over time, starting with a $100 million to $150 million vehicle focused on the blue economy. The firm is led by President and CEO Alex McCallum and Executive Chairman Telfer Hanson, who spent three decades in international investment banking before shaping AGP’s strategy. AGP is now seeking founders, co-investors, and institutional partners aligned with long-term regional growth.

Read the announcement here.

🏭 Isometric raises $40M to expand AI-driven certification beyond carbon markets

Isometric raised $40 million in Series A funding to scale its agentic certification platform. AVP led the round, and existing backers Plural and Lowercarbon Capital returned, alongside personal investment from John Doerr and Walter Kortschak. The premise is that a tonne of green steel looks identical to conventional steel, but certification is what makes these claims verifiable. Its platform, Certify, uses AI agents to cross-check the data behind those claims, cutting a process that used to take 12 months down to hours.

Isometric built its track record in carbon removal, where it’s now the largest certifier with more than 16 million tonnes contracted. Its marine work includes issuing the first independently verified credits from ocean alkalinity enhancement and certified protocols for Direct Ocean Capture & Storage. With this raise, Isometric is the best-capitalized certifier in carbon markets and is extending Certify to the rest of the industrial economy.

Read the announcement here.

🤝 Frontier commits $915M more to carbon removal, with ocean-based methods among its priorities

Frontier is a coalition of major companies like Google, Stripe, Shopify, Salesforce, and now Anthropic, that promise to buy carbon removal credits in advance so the companies producing them can raise money and scale faster. Frontier just added $915 million to that pool, bringing its total commitment to $1.8 billion since launching in 2022. One method it’s betting on is ocean alkalinity enhancement, which adds a limestone-based material to seawater so the ocean can absorb more carbon dioxide from the air, an approach Frontier believes could eventually scale to over 10 billion tons removed per year.

Getting there would mean building out coastal outfalls and ships to spread the material across the open ocean, along with better tools to confirm it’s working safely. Rather than spreading money across many small, early-stage projects as it has in the past, Frontier is now concentrating on fewer companies through longer 8 to 10 year purchase agreements, each requiring a credible path to long-term demand. Its portfolio has delivered roughly 23,000 tons of carbon removal so far, double the year before, and it has published safety guidelines specifically for marine carbon removal projects.

Read the article here.

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📊 Ocean services trade hit $1.44 trillion in 2025, with tourism leading the way

New UNCTAD data show that the ocean economy is increasingly being driven by services rather than physical goods. Tourism, shipping, and port logistics now make up 58% of total ocean-related trade, up from 47% in 2020, with marine and coastal tourism alone reaching $785 billion last year after a decrease during the pandemic.

Physical ocean goods still matter, with ships, equipment, seafood, and high-tech manufacturing crossing $1 trillion in 2025, but the data suggest that the bigger growth opportunity lies in what happens around the ocean rather than what comes out of it. For small island and coastal developing nations, UNCTAD points to this shift as a practical opening to build exports and create jobs through blue economy strategies, without needing large-scale industrial infrastructure to do it.

Read more here.

⚡ Endurance Energy raises $54M Series A to tap geothermal energy from the ocean floor

Endurance Energy, founded by former SpaceX engineer Andrew Redd, has raised a $54 million Series A to develop geothermal power plants on the ocean floor. Founders Fund led the round, with participation from Felicis Ventures, First Round Capital, Point72 Ventures, Voyager Ventures, and others. The company is targeting tectonic spreading zones along the Ring of Fire, where magma flows close to the surface, as sites for underwater power plants.

Redd’s pitch is that ocean-based geothermal solves the core limitations of land-based alternatives. The best onshore sites are already claimed, and drilling deep enough elsewhere is costly and slow. Endurance estimates there are around 6 terawatts of developable geothermal potential along the Ring of Fire alone, enough to power any major coastal city in the region. The company plans to use an optimization algorithm to balance cable costs, resource scale, and market size on shore when selecting sites.

Read the TechCrunch article here.

🐠 Anthropic and REEF are teaming up to strengthen marine citizen science

Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) has been selected as a host for Claude Corps, a new Anthropic fellowship program that places early-career talent within mission-driven nonprofits for 12-month, fully funded placements. Beginning in October, fellows will work alongside REEF staff on projects including improving data tools for the Volunteer Fish Survey Project and organizing its conservation media archive.

REEF runs one of the world’s largest marine life citizen science datasets, built from more than 30 years of underwater observations contributed by volunteer divers and snorkelers. The Key Largo-based organization says its focus within the fellowship will be on practical applications for existing conservation and research work.

Read the press release here.

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Then, in December 2022, it reopened. The difference was a Norwegian company called Ava Ocean, with a fundamentally different approach to getting food off the ocean floor.

I sat down with Dagny-Elise Anastassiou, Chief Impact Officer at Ava Ocean, to understand how that technology works and where the company is taking it next.

The Problem With How We Harvest

Most people don’t think much about how seafood gets from the seabed to their plate. The dominant methods, dredging and bottom trawling, drag heavy equipment across the ocean floor, pulling up target species along with everything else and leaving damage behind. Dredging is banned in Norway and Belize. In most of the world, it remains standard practice.

Ava Ocean, founded in Ålesund in 2016, built its technology around a different model. Their patented, non-invasive harvesting system uses precision identification, selection, and sorting to pick individual bottom-dwelling species without disturbing the surrounding ecosystem. No dragging or collateral damage, and lower fuel consumption since targeted harvesting means less time running the vessel.

Proof in the Barents Sea

Ava Ocean’s vessel, the Arctic Pearl, became the first to carry the company’s harvesting system onboard. It was deployed commercially for Arctic scallops in the Barents Sea, and the technology’s documented low impact was what allowed the 30-year-old fishery closure to finally lift in December 2022. Precision seabed harvesting, done carefully, can restore access to resources that destructive practices had made off-limits for a generation.

Turning the Technology on Another Problem

With scallops as the foundation, Ava Ocean has adapted that same system for a different challenge. In Northern Norway, over 80% of the region’s original kelp forests have disappeared over the last 50 years. The cause was overfishing that removed the natural predators keeping sea urchin populations in check. And left unchecked, urchins ate through the kelp. What remains is the equivalent of 1 million football pitches of urchin barrens.

The response is Ocean Green, a large-scale regenerative urchin harvesting project that launched in early 2024 and runs through September 2027. It’s backed by 47 million Norwegian Krone (NOK) from Norway’s Green Platform and has been endorsed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science under its Marine Life 2030 program.

The goal isn’t to remove all the urchins. They’re native to the region and play a role in the ecosystem. The aim is to bring numbers down enough that kelp forests can return naturally. The harvesting technology is projected to pull around 768 kilograms of urchins per hour, a throughput that manual harvesting cannot match.

What Happens to the Urchins

Ocean Green is built around a zero-waste model. High-quality urchins go toward food. Lower-quality urchins are being explored for fertilizer, enzymes, biomarble, and art pigments. Revenue from the urchin fishery is estimated at approximately NOK 8 million annually based on a 240-day fishing year, and that commercial return is what makes the restoration work financially viable over time.

The broader stakes are worth noting. Kelp forests absorb CO2 at rates that exceed terrestrial forests, buffer coastlines against storm damage, and serve as nurseries for commercially important fish species. Their restoration has implications well beyond Northern Norway.

Ava Ocean has spent a decade demonstrating that there’s an alternative way to harvest seafood without damaging the seabed. The reopened scallop fishery in the Barents Sea is evidence of that. Ocean Green is the next application of the same idea.

Learn more at avaocean.no.

This article is part of a new spotlight series on Blue Tide, which tells a deeper story about the people and solutions shaping the blue economy. If you know someone who would like to be featured then send me an email.

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Something new is coming to Blue Tide starting this Friday. Every week I talk to people doing interesting work in the ocean space, and I want to give these stories more room than a newsletter paragraph allows. From now on, expect a long-form spotlight every week. The first features a company rethinking how we harvest scallops, and it goes out this Friday.

Congratulations to The Ocean Connections on their launch in Miami this World Oceans Day. They're the first cultural platform dedicated to Blue Storydoing, a methodology that moves beyond traditional storytelling to combine science, data, and tangible outcomes. Learn more here.

🌱 WEF makes the case for a regenerative blue economy

The World Economic Forum published a new insight report this month making the case that sustainability alone is not enough for the ocean economy. Where sustainability focuses on reducing harm and maintaining the status quo, a regenerative approach goes further by actively restoring what has been lost. The report argues that most ocean industries are still operating within already degraded systems, and that the goal must shift from doing less harm to doing more good, rebuilding marine ecosystems and coastal communities rather than simply slowing their decline.

The report identifies four levers needed to unlock this shift, including governance, finance, human capacity, and technology and AI. On finance, it notes that less than 1% of the ocean economy’s estimated annual value has been invested in its sustainability over the past decade, while harmful subsidies continue to flow. The report states that the tools to change this already exist, from blue bonds and debt-for-nature swaps to community-led finance models, and that what is missing is the coordinated architecture to make regenerative finance the norm rather than the exception.

Read the full report here.

📡 EU ramps up ocean observation as US scales back

The European Commission recently launched Ocean Eye, a new ocean observation program pitching itself as a free, open-access global data resource, with a goal of providing 35% of the global ocean observation system by 2035. The announcement comes as the Trump administration dismantles the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative, a decade-old network of data buoys tracking ocean temperature, chemistry, wave conditions, and ecosystem health across the Pacific and Atlantic. Four of the five arrays are set to be removed by September 2027, representing roughly $370 million in specialized equipment.

The US network was notably open-source, giving scientists at smaller institutions access to continuous deep-sea data without needing expensive research vessels. And fishing communities on the Pacific Northwest coast have already begun losing the real-time safety and ecosystem data they relied on for their daily operations at sea. The EU's Ocean Eye, currently funded at $92 million, is significantly smaller and will use a mix of deep-sea sensors, satellite imagery, and autonomous marine robots. The EU has called on other countries to contribute, noting that no single nation can observe the ocean alone.

Read the full article here.

🪸 Spotlight on Brackish Strategies

Despite the ocean economy being valued at more than $3 trillion, private climate tech finance flowing into ocean technologies remains a fraction of what the sector warrants. Brooke Lynn Elzweig founded Brackish Strategies in November 2024 to bridge that gap, bringing the technical grounding of a marine scientist with a deep understanding of capital, commercialization, and how sectors connect.

Brackish Strategies is a boutique advisory firm working with growth-stage ventures in coastal resilience, water infrastructure, and climate-enabling materials. The firm takes its name from the brackish zone, the estuarine environment where salt and fresh water converge and one of the most productive ecosystems on earth, applying that same logic to business by helping founders sharpen their positioning and get in front of the right capital with the right framing.

(Brooke and I are working on a long-form piece together exploring commercialization in the blue economy. Stay tuned.)

Learn more about Brackish Strategies here.

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🇲🇨 Key themes from the BEFF in Monaco

The Blue Economy and Finance Forum held its second edition in Monaco on May 28 and 29, drawing world leaders and private investors to make the case that ocean investment has moved well beyond philanthropy. Prince Albert II opened with a direct challenge to attendees, arguing that the question of whether the ocean is investable has been settled and that the task now is deploying capital at scale.

The forum’s broader message was that ocean finance is maturing structurally, not just in ambition. While the ocean economy generates $2.5 trillion annually, sustainable financing currently sits at around $150 billion, a gap driven not by lack of investor interest but by the absence of common standards and de-risking mechanisms. Financial modeling presented at the event suggests upwards of $550 billion could be deployed into sustainable ocean sectors by 2030.

Read the article here.

🏛️ US hearing on the blue economy

On June 2, Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska chaired a Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing on the blue economy, examining opportunities and challenges across seafood, mariculture, tourism, shipping, and ocean technology. It’s a signal that the sector is gaining serious legislative attention at the federal level. In his opening statement, Sullivan noted that the blue economy generated more than $470 billion in goods and services and supported 2.4 million jobs in 2022, describing it as one of the fastest growing sectors in the American economy.

The hearing placed particular emphasis on Alaska, which harvests over 60% of America’s commercial seafood and holds more coastline than the rest of the country combined. Key themes included workforce shortages across maritime industries, the threat of illegal and unreported fishing, and the need for sustained federal investment in ports, infrastructure, and science. Sullivan also highlighted progress on several pieces of legislation, including the FISH Act targeting illegal foreign fishing and a forthcoming bycatch bill he described as the most comprehensive in American history.

Read more here.

Watch the full hearing.

🌊 Time Magazine examines the case for ocean investment

Time Magazine dedicated its annual ocean issue this year to a question the industry is actively wrestling with: can private capital save the ocean, and should it have to? The piece profiles founders building at the intersection of ocean protection and commercial viability, from seaweed-based packaging to coral reef restoration to microplastic filtration, making the case that profit motive and ocean health are no longer mutually exclusive goals.

The piece is honest about the tensions. Private capital is flowing in, but investors often lack ocean expertise, and the first wave of ocean investment funds are only now reaching maturity. Some companies benefiting most are those with dual commercial and defense applications, particularly ocean monitoring and mapping. The article closes with a pointed observation that big capital will not flow at the scale needed until governments change how they frame ocean health, not as an environmental concern but as an economic necessity.

Read more here.

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⚓ Seaworthy Collective's Startup Showcase put South Florida's BlueTech scene on full display

Seaworthy Collective hosted its 7th Startup Showcase, bringing together local ecosystem members to meet the latest cohort from its flagship accelerator program, developed in partnership with NOAA through The Continuum with a focus on ocean data technologies. Since launching, the Miami-based nonprofit has supported 111 entrepreneurs, educated more than 5,600 people on BlueTech, and helped its community raise over $34 million in grants and investments.

The seven startups in Cohort 7 span seafloor mapping, seafood traceability, coastal safety, marine waste, and environmental data, reflecting how broadly the BlueTech sector is defining itself. Seaworthy Collective is also exploring the development of an investment fund and expanding its programming to Tampa Bay with support from JPMorgan Chase.

I attended the event and wrote a full recap for Refresh Miami. Read it here.

🚢 Quartermaster raised $43 million to make the oceans more visible

Most ships today rely on a tracking system called AIS, which works by letting vessels self-report their location. The problem is that it’s opt-in, manually entered, and easy to spoof, making it unreliable for detecting smuggling, sanctions evasion, or anything else happening on the high seas. Quartermaster, an Arlington-based startup, is building a replacement it calls SmartMast, a weather-hardened package of cameras, radios, and sensors that mounts on a ship’s mast and feeds real-time data into an analytics platform, creating what the company describes as a continuous, distributed sensing network across the world’s oceans.

The company has raised a $43 million Series A co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, and says more than 600 ships using SmartMast have already covered 10 million square miles of ocean. The primary use cases include identifying vessels, collecting training data for marine autonomy, supporting government intelligence, and aiding scientists and robotics researchers. SmartMast-equipped ships have also assisted in over 20 rescues of mariners at sea, a signal of how broadly the technology can be applied once the infrastructure is in place.

Read the full article here.

🐋 How tech is protecting gray whales in one of America's busiest bays

Gray whales are increasingly stopping in San Francisco Bay during their 16,000-kilometer migration from Alaska to Mexico, drawn in by hunger as climate change disrupts their Arctic food chain. The population has declined from around 20,500 in 2018 to about 14,500 in 2023, and in 2025 alone, 21 whales were found dead in and around the bay, two-fifths of them from ship strikes.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spent 15 years developing a solution, now commercialized through a company called WhaleSpotter. Thermal cameras detect whales up to 7 kilometers away by identifying the slight temperature difference between a whale and the surrounding water, and once a researcher confirms the detection, nearby vessels receive an alert to slow down or reroute.

Read the full article.

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🌊 The ocean is a macroeconomic issue, not just an environmental one

A recent World Economic Forum article, co-authored with McKinsey, makes the case that the ocean underpins much of the global economy and deserves to be treated as such. It supports roughly 90% of global trade by volume, provides 20% of daily protein for more than 3 billion people, regulates climate stability, and protects coastal infrastructure through ecosystems like reefs and mangroves. Yet from a capital markets perspective, it remains both underpriced and under-allocated.

The piece argues this creates two problems. Ocean-related risk is already embedded across portfolios through supply chains, insurance markets, and sovereign debt, often without investors realizing it. At the same time, the growth opportunity remains largely untapped, with ocean-based industries currently generating over $3 trillion in annual economic value and projections suggesting the sector could reach $5.1 trillion by 2050. It’s a useful read for anyone trying to understand why ocean health is ultimately an economic issue as much as an environmental one.

Read the full article here.

🇦🇴 Angola launches a €30 million EU blue economy initiative

Angola has launched a new blue economy initiative backed by €30 million from the European Union, targeting fisheries, aquaculture, and marine services as part of a broader push to diversify its economy beyond oil. The programme brings together a European consortium led by Spain, with Portugal taking the lead on sustainable marine resource management and France also participating. A formal launch workshop was held in Angola in March 2026, bringing together Angolan government officials, European partners, and maritime sector experts to define implementation priorities.

The initiative continues a pattern of coordinated European investment in African ocean economies, combining economic development goals with environmental sustainability and climate resilience. For Angola, the programme aligns with national efforts to leverage its extensive Atlantic coastline for fisheries production, maritime trade, and ocean-based innovation. Analysts note that success will depend on strengthening institutional coordination, improving regulatory enforcement, and attracting sustained investment into coastal infrastructure and marine science capacity.

Read the full announcement here.

🧰 Spotlight on The Ocean Toolbox

The ocean ecosystem already exists, but finding the right partner, funder, or investor within it can be harder than it should be. Ophélie Clément, an entrepreneur based in Indonesia, spent two years mapping the blue economy through 200+ interviews with founders, NGOs, and investors before building The Ocean Toolbox to solve that problem.

The platform maps more than 1,800 verified organizations across 87 countries into a single searchable database, updated weekly, and covering funders, venture capital firms, accelerators, startups, and NGOs. It’s designed to help founders find funding faster and give investors better visibility into the pipeline, with a free version for basic access and a paid tier for deeper research and the full database.

Explore the platform here.

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Also wanted to bring the NYC OceanTech Summit to your attention, hosted in early June. It'll bring together ocean innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers in the tristate area. Learn more here.

🇰🇪🇫🇷 Blue economy as diplomacy

France signed over $1 billion worth of agreements with Kenya this week, covering 11 cooperation instruments across transport, infrastructure, maritime affairs, and economic development. Among them was a Declaration of Intent for Cooperation in Blue Economy and Fisheries, which is expected to strengthen collaboration in fisheries, maritime governance, aquaculture, ocean resource management, and sustainable coastal development along Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline.

For France, the Kenya partnership represents a strategic opening in East Africa at a time when Paris is recalibrating its Africa policy following military withdrawals and political tensions in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Kenya, for its part, is actively positioning itself as East Africa's leading maritime and logistics hub, making it a strategic partner with an abundance of ocean resources.

Read the full article here.

🐟 Bottom trawling report breaks down a complex debate

Bottom trawling is a fishing method where large nets are dragged along the seabed to catch fish, shellfish, and other species. It accounts for around a quarter of all wild-caught seafood globally, making it highly relevant to what ends up on our plates. It’s also one of the most debated fishing practices in the world, and the David Attenborough Ocean documentary brought it back into the headlines, prompting widespread public and political discussion about whether it should be banned.

MarFishEco, a fisheries consultancy that works with scientists, governments, NGOs, and fishing communities, has published a new report that aims to cut through the noise. It covers what bottom trawling is, what science says about its environmental impacts, the management tools that can reduce harm, and the debate around banning it in Marine Protected Areas. Rather than landing on a verdict, the report presents both sides of the argument and makes the case for solutions that reflect the realities of individual fisheries and regions.

Read the report here.

🌿 One of the first certified marine biodiversity credits

Biodiversity credits are an emerging financing tool that allows businesses to fund the protection of ecosystems, similar in concept to carbon credits but focused on nature and habitat health rather than emissions. The Vanga Seagrass Project by ACES in Kenya is set to be one of the first certified marine biodiversity projects in the world, protecting 225 hectares of seagrass meadows through an internationally recognized certification process. Vanga Bay contains about 14% of all seagrass in Kenya and supports endangered species including dugongs, but the meadows had been degraded by illegal and destructive fishing practices before the project began.

What makes the project stand out is that protection is community-led. The communities of Vanga, Jimbo, Kiwegu, and Jasini designated two areas in the bay for protection themselves, and community members now run regular sea patrols to enforce it. The project is notable for an additional reason, while seagrasses sequester roughly 10% of the carbon buried in ocean sediment each year, existing frameworks make it difficult to certify seagrass under a carbon standard, so the biodiversity route opens a new pathway for funding coastal marine protection.

Learn more about the project here.

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If you're a founder or operator in the ocean and climate tech space and want to learn how to use content marketing to grow your business, I'm hosting a free session this Thursday. Register here.

🌊 1000 Ocean Startups updated map of the ecosystem

1000 Ocean Startups is a World Economic Forum-hosted coalition of over 65 organizations, including accelerators, venture capital funds, and family offices, working together to support ocean-focused startups around the world. Their newly updated report tracks the state of the ocean innovation ecosystem, and the numbers show meaningful growth. The coalition has now supported over 850 startups with a combined estimated valuation of at least $12 billion, and its geographic reach has expanded from 35 countries in 2021 to 67 countries in 2026.

The report finds that sustainable blue foods is the most mature sector by stage of company development, while ocean intelligence and ecosystem restoration are still heavily concentrated at the early stage. The US and Europe remain the largest hubs, with the biggest startup concentrations in the US, Norway, the UK, Australia, and Canada, alongside growing activity in Kenya, Nigeria, and Israel. The coalition’s goal is to reach 1,000 supported startups by 2030.

Explore the ecosystem here.

🔋 Electric ships could soon charge while at sea

Charging an electric ship currently means sailing back to port, which can drain a significant portion of the battery before any work gets done. Researchers at SINTEF, a Norwegian research organization, have developed a magnetic charging system that could change that. Instead of a physical cable connection, which corrodes quickly in salt water, the system uses two coils that transfer power through magnetic fields when brought close together, one attached to a charging source like an offshore wind turbine, the other mounted on the ship.

The researchers describe the connection as similar to placing a cup in a cup holder, requiring no precise alignment and no exposed metal. The primary use case is service vessels that maintain offshore wind farms, which would be able to recharge directly at the turbines they service rather than making the trip back to shore. If the technology proves out at scale, it could point toward a broader shift in how electric vessels operate at sea, reducing one of the key practical barriers to wider adoption in commercial shipping.

Read the full article here.

🇸🇨 Seychelles calls for more blue bonds

A blue bond works like a regular government bond, except the money raised is specifically earmarked for ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries. Seychelles launched the world’s first in 2018, raising $15 million from private investors to fund marine protected areas and fisheries management. Writing ahead of next month’s Global Environment Facility meeting in Uzbekistan, former Seychelles President James Alix Michel argues the instrument needs to be adopted more widely, particularly by other small island nations that depend heavily on the ocean for their economies.

His case is straightforward: countries like Seychelles often carry high levels of national debt while relying on marine resources for a large share of their income, making ocean health a financial issue as much as an environmental one. The blue bond model gives these nations a way to attract private investment for ocean protection at terms that traditional aid programs typically cannot offer.

Read the full article here.

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Plus, if there are any founders and operators in the ocean and climate tech startup world who would like to learn about content marketing and how to use it to grow your business, I'm hosting a free session on May 7 to explore this topic. Register here.

🌿 Floating algae are expanding across the world's oceans

Researchers have produced a global picture of floating algae across the world’s oceans, and the findings point to a significant increase. Using AI to analyze 1.2 million satellite images spanning 20 years, scientists from the University of South Florida and NOAA found that both microalgal scum and larger macroalgal mats expanded steadily between 2003 and 2022, with macroalgae blooms growing at 13.4% per year in the tropical Atlantic and western Pacific.

Ocean warming, shifting currents, and nutrient runoff from human activity are driving the expansion. In open water, floating algae can provide habitat and nursery grounds for marine species, but the picture changes when blooms reach coastal areas, where decaying biomass damages ecosystems, local economies, and public health. The study, published in Nature Communications, gives scientists and coastal managers a global baseline to track these changes and anticipate their effects.

Read the full article.

🏗️ $40 million to improve Gulf Coast resiliency

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program has awarded $20 million each to two projects through its Gulf Futures Challenge, an initiative to fund science-driven solutions to key challenges facing the Gulf Coast region.

The Louisiana Public Health Institute will use its award to transform community health centers across four Gulf states into energy-independent, climate-adaptive facilities capable of staying operational before, during, and after natural disasters.

The Gulf Offshore Research Institute will use its award to research and demonstrate the repurposing of idle offshore oil and gas infrastructure for green hydrogen production, open ocean aquaculture, continuous data collection, and critical mineral harvesting.

Read the full article here.

🦪 Native Shorelines adds carbon storage to its reef restoration product

Native Shorelines, a division of Davey Resource Group, has a patent-pending enhancement to its QuickReef living shoreline system called QuickReef Carbon+. The product combines the existing reef units, made primarily from recycled oyster shell and natural limestone, with biochar produced from wood chips generated through Davey’s tree care operations.

Embedding the biochar – a stable, carbon-rich form of charcoal produced by heating biomass in low-oxygen conditions – into the reef structure gives the sequestered carbon a permanent home while building on QuickReef’s existing shoreline stabilization and habitat restoration functions.

Biochar is also known for its ability to absorb certain nutrients and contaminants in water. Beyond carbon sequestration, the Davey Institute is conducting applied research to quantify the water quality benefits of the new product, including its potential to absorb nutrients and PFAS from surrounding waters.

Read the full article here.

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⚡ The state of ocean energy

The International Energy Agency’s ocean program published its annual report for 2025, drawing on activity across 20 member countries. The most notable shift shared is that ocean energy devices are spending more time in the water. Rather than short one-off trials, more projects are moving through repeated cycles of deployment, learning, and redeployment. Grid-connected tidal installations in the UK, China, and the Faroe Islands have now accumulated years of continuous operation, and that track record is what the sector has needed to begin building investor confidence.

The report also captures a broadening of how ocean energy is being applied. Projects are increasingly paired with desalination, hydrogen production, aquaculture, and island microgrids, making them more economically viable in remote coastal settings where energy is expensive to deliver. On the policy side, the EU has formally recognized tidal and wave energy as part of its clean industry strategy, and several countries updated their national plans and permitting rules in 2025 to make it easier to run demonstration projects.

Read the full report here.

🗺️ Mapping the ocean's tidal potential

A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society mapped 426 sites across 19 countries where underwater tidal turbines could realistically generate electricity. The technology works much like a wind turbine, only on the seabed, powered by the twice-daily movement of tides. Researchers estimate that the 90 best-studied sites alone could produce around 110 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, roughly equal to Portugal’s annual demand. The countries with the largest resources include the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, China, and Indonesia.

What makes tidal energy stand out is predictability. Unlike wind or solar, tidal output can be forecast years in advance, making it a reliable complement to weather-dependent renewables. More than half of the global resource sits within just six locations, including the Pentland Firth in Scotland, the Alderney Race between France and the Channel Islands, and Canada’s Bay of Fundy. The UK and France have already committed to installing at least 400 megawatts of tidal capacity over the next decade, and the research gives developers a clearer picture of where the best opportunities lie.

Read the full article here.

🌊 Marisyn's wave-powered data centers

Data centers consumed approximately 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, with projections indicating a rise to between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report. The existing power grid and available land are not built to keep up with that kind of growth. Founded in 2024, Marine Synthesis Inc. (Marisyn) is building an alternative – data centers housed in underwater pods, powered directly by ocean wave energy, and with no grid connection required.

One added benefit of going underwater is cooling. Keeping servers from overheating is one of the biggest energy costs for land-based data centers, but seawater does that job naturally. Waves off U.S. coasts can theoretically generate more than half of the country’s total annual electricity needs, and Marisyn is drawing on over 25 years of accumulated marine energy development to put that resource to work.

Learn more about Marisyn here.

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💶 The Blue Economy Is Attracting More Investors

The European Commission’s BlueInvest Investor Report 2026 maps 159 private funds active in the blue economy in the EU, with around €3 billion coming from funds fully dedicated to the sector and around €11 billion from investors with partial exposure. Venture capital firms make up most of the activity, though private equity and corporate investors are showing growing interest, particularly in areas linked to infrastructure, energy, and decarbonization.

Shipping, shipbuilding, and ports ranked as the most financially attractive sectors among investors surveyed, followed by blue renewable energy, water management, and blue biotechnology. The report notes that later-stage funding remains limited, which can make it harder for companies to scale, and that the blue economy remains underfunded relative to its potential despite the growing momentum.

Read the report.

🌀 AI Is Mapping Ocean Currents by the Hour

Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography have developed a method called GOFLOW that uses deep learning to measure ocean surface currents in greater detail than existing approaches, using thermal imagery from weather satellites already in orbit. The technique tracks how temperature patterns bend, stretch, and shift from one hour to the next to infer the currents responsible, producing hourly maps where standard satellite methods typically image the same location only once every ten days.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience and co-led by oceanographer Luc Lenain, was tested against shipboard instrument data in the Gulf Stream region and showed strong agreement with established methods while revealing significantly more detail on smaller, faster-moving eddies. Because it relies on existing geostationary satellites, no new hardware is required. Cloud cover remains a current limitation, and the team is working to extend the method globally.

Read the full article.

🌬️ Spotlight on SkyWind Solutions

Keeping to the theme of improved ocean data, SkyWind Solutions is an AI-powered platform built to address a specific blind spot in coastal forecasting. Public tide predictions are based on the gravitational pull of the sun and moon but do not account for local factors like wind, weather, and sea level rise that drive actual coastal water heights. Tide gauges are also widely spaced, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, leaving large stretches of coastline underserved and forcing operators to estimate, which can result in forecast errors of one to three feet, and more during storms.

SkyWind's platform delivers tide predictions customized to a specific location rather than the nearest gauge, using AI models that continuously learn and self-correct over time. Forecasts come with probability ranges that show the spread of likely outcomes, giving operators like ports and offshore construction firms clearer context for decision-making. The company recently received funding from The Continuum Ocean Enterprise Accelerator, backed by NOAA, which it will use to support five to eight pilot forecasting deployments.

Learn more about SkyWind Solutions.

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