3 years ago I went on a quest to get to the bottom of this whole Climate Change debate. I read books and articles for 6 months, and I found myself believing that the Ocean is the key to all of it. Ever since then, Boost VC has been discovering some of the most passionate entrepreneurs in the world, around the intersection of oceans/entrepreneurship. I think it’s time to solidify “OceanTech” as a tech industry.
From Aquaculture to Shipping and logistics, there are trillion dollar markets dependent on the oceans existence. If it wasn’t for the ocean, humanity would not exist. And if I have it my way, we will have ocean cities within 20 years. The ocean hosts 70% of the worlds commerce, and 95% of it’s communication bandwidth.
- Data: 70% of the planet is a massive blind spot to humanity. We need more information, so I believe the gateway to this is to track data on the ocean. More sensors in the ocean, more tools tracking data already on the ocean, Aquaculture and logistics adopting more analytic based approaches… these are exciting!
- Feeding 9 Billion People: The ocean is the answer to the question of how to feed 9B people. 2014 was the first year that we, as humans, farmed more fish than we “hunted” or caught through the standard fishing approach. Which means there is still incredible growth in the farming part of the ocean!
- More Oysters and Kelp!: Oysters are the liver of the sea and are responsible for filtering nitrates out of the ocean. Kelp sequesters carbon better than anything else on the planet. WE NEED MORE!! I want to see startups scaling Oysters and Kelp.
- Less Plastics: We need alternatives to plastics, we need to profitably capture all the plastics in the ocean, and we need more sustainable thinking when it comes to plastics! This is a hot topic, but also a necessity in the next 10 years.
- Ambition: We want someone to come in and pitch me on how they are going to own the ocean. On how they are going to clean up the trash heap the size of Texas, profitably. We want someone to tell us something that we doubt would happen, something so ambitious it sounds insane, because I want to invest in the most ambitious founders taking on the Ocean sector.
We are searching for the most determined entrepreneurs using the latest technologies to solve the hardest problems of today. Or as we like to say, making SciFi a Reality. If you are working on Oceans come talk to us!
Or email me — adam(at) boost (dot) vc — if there are more OceanTech startups I should be searching for!
