Long before Pierre Paslier became an ocean entrepreneur, he was a plastics-packaging engineer, turning fossil fuels into the materials needed to ship and sell cosmetics. But he knew there had to be a better way. After taking a break from the corporate world, he went back to school and launched into an experimental phase with his co-founder Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez. In a makeshift kitchen lab, they played around with food materials trying to figure out which would do the best job at mimicking plastics. Before long, they hit on a clue: imitation caviar, whose tiny membranes are made from seaweed, behaved in some ways like the packaging they were trying to invent.
The company they founded in 2014, Notpla (think “Not Plastic”), eventually expanded to build a product line including takeaway boxes, flexible films, rigid cutlery, and seaweed-based paper. Perhaps more importantly, it joined a growing ecosystem of startups committed to simultaneously making use of ocean resourcesand supporting their conservation. Inspired by companies like Notpla, the bank Standard Chartered in 2023 wrote a white paper on seaweed, declaring it an investable asset category. Suddenly, capital began to flow to seaweed startups.
Today, more than $780 million has been invested in seaweed ventures, according to Phyconomy, a seaweed-investment tracker. “I see Notpla as a good visible application to make the case for why it’s worth spending more of our attention, brains, and dollars to the ocean space,” says Paslier. “There are a lot of solutions that are going to come from it in the future.”
Those solutions couldn’t come fast enough. Oceans face continued and deepening threats from humans, from overfishing to plastic pollution. Coral reefs are dying at such a clip that scientists warn of irreversible loss. At the same time, oceans face the challenge of funding pullbacks from governments and nonprofits. The fractured geo-political landscape also hampers efforts to forge international conservation agreements, even though some big successes like the High Seas Treaty have moved forward. But some environmental advocates, alongside a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors, are coming around to a realization: position this threat slightly differently and it actually becomes an opportunity.
Last year, J.P. Morgan estimated the value of ocean-related activity, what it called the “annual gross marine product,” at $2.5 trillion annually. And it noted that ocean-climate startups have raised over $5 billion in venture funding over the past decade. Most is early-stage financing, meaning there may be much more to come as companies mature.
“We need to continue growing an asset class that is not just for impact investors or philanthropic investors, but something that people look at as part of their portfolio,” says Philippe Cousteau, founder of the ocean-tech company Voyacy Regen, and grandson of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. This is easier said than done.
Oceans are a new investment category, and there’s no guarantee enough investors will buy into the thesis to make it more than just a niche. Even if they do, it will be difficult to reach finance levels required to meet the scale of the challenge. And some ocean advocates say the private sector is poorly positioned to decide which practices are actually sustainable, much less protect oceans equitably.
Though the first Law of the Sea dates to the Middle Ages, oceans are profoundly difficult to regulate and manage—especially as some governments abandon climate policy. Guy Standing, an economist whose book The Blue Commons is considered a landmark in ocean protection, describes it as a “Wild West situation” as President Donald Trump disrupts seemingly any intergovernmental collaboration. It’s in this gap that the private sector could determine the future. Its role in ocean protection may not have been the first-best option. But with oceans in worsening shape and governments occupied with other priorities, it would be foolish to ignore the possibilities.
At first blush, Notpla may not sound like an oceans company. While the key material input is seaweed, Paslier and his co-founder aren’t oceanographers or marine biologists. Much of the company’s work happens in London, far from the seaweed farms that supply its core ingredient. And its end use, namely packaging, is in some ways a more obvious categorization. But the company wears its ocean label proudly.
source : time
