Melbourne, Victoria, Australia — Venture studio Blue Ocean Ventures announced that it will continue supporting its first development project, SHRMP.bio, a biotech startup that aims to revolutionize seafood manufacturing using modern technology. The startup has made significant progress since its launch in February 2024 and has garnered attention by participating in Australian incubator programs run by Startmate and the National Agriculture and Food Incubator.
SHRMP.bio, through a fusion of molecular biology, industrial bioprocessing and automation with the latest aquafarming approaches, has the potential to overcome current production challenges and move seafood production into urban or industrial areas close to markets. This would minimise land use, simplify supply chains, and shift seafood production away from areas severely exposed to climate risks. Blue Ocean Ventures believes that high-tech Aquaculture presents a significant business opportunity to tackle future food production and nutrition challenges brought forth by population growth and climate change. This perspective was well-received by the participants of AquaFarm 2024, Australia’s premier industry conference, held on the Gold Coast in May 2024.
SHRMP.bio is aiming to seize this opportunity.
As a small first step on their journey SHRMP.bio recently received the Public Choice Award at a pitch night run by Australian innovation powerhouse Startmate. This has opened doors for the company to now join the new Buildmate program. The start of Buildmate now also sees Blue Ocean Ventures’ Dr. Lichtfuss join SHRMP.bio full-time to advance the company further.
Aquaculture is a challenging innovation environment in Australia, as Dr. Lichtfuss, Managing Director of Blue Ocean Ventures and CEO of SHRMP.bio, explained:
“As predicted, SHRMP.bio’s journey is not all smooth sailing, partially for reasons typically associated with starting a new venture. It’s just never easy. But partially also for less obvious reasons.” reflects Dr Lichtfuss on the startup’s first 6 months. “We love our seafood in Australia. We have thousands of kilometres of coastline – a quarter more than the US. But, we import over 90% of our seafood, often at unsustainably low prices. The combination of the lack of a local production industry and currently low product prices leads to the sector being largely overlooked as a valid innovation and business opportunity. This is reflected in scarce research funding and low investment appetite in this area and, consequently, in a scattered startup ecosystem. Related to this, common feedback focused on the need to rapidly become profitable and match today’s very low prices. However, building an innovative hardware company in two years or a profitable biotechnology company in five years is impossible. Regarding price pressures, we don’t expect imported seafood prices to stay as low as they are today for the next 5 to 10 years. In addition have overseas companies already demonstrated that some market segments are willing to pay a premium price for high-quality, locally-made seafood – already today. This experience showed a need to articulate better the value proposition behind SHRMP.bio, which is less about selling seafood into the Australian market but creating and owning the technologies enabling the future seafood production in a global market that will likely look very different to today.”
But innovation and investment in high-tech Aquaculture may present a significant future economic opportunity as Dr. Lichtfuss outlined:
“As a direct consequence, a large part of SHRMP.bio’s early journey has been about validating the overall business opportunity for high-tech Aquaculture. And we concluded that the future opportunity may be even bigger than we initially thought ourselves, which is really exciting!”
Sharing some insights into their work, Dr. Lichtfuss gave some of the reasons for this assessment:
“We spent significant effort building our own scenarios analysing trends for the coming 25 years to guide Blue Ocean Ventures’, but also SHRMP.bio’s, development. And, in a nutshell, globally, we have plenty of challenges ahead of us – but also opportunities. This lies in the combination of population growth and habitation with most of us are going to be living in urbanised areas, many of us at high age, together with the impacts of climate change disrupting today’s food production, the predicted short supply of key animal-derived nutrients, and the significant risk of conflict negatively impacting the trade of food. But we also expect that technological advances have the potential to allow us to adapt to these conditions – and ownership of those technologies will be the key driver of value in the food production sector in the future, which is a perspective that we also discussed with industry experts at this year’s AquaFarm conference at the Gold Coast. The ownership of enabling technology is where we see SHRMP.bio’s main business opportunity and why we reaffirmed our commitment to build SHRMP.bio.”
Dr. Lichtfuss concluded with SHRMP.bio’s view on the Australian Aquaculture Innovation environment:
“Based on the interactions that SHRMP.bio had over this year, from a high-level strategic point of view, I am concerned that we may too heavily rely on our food export power from the other agricultural sectors and also not pay enough attention to how the rest of the world is developing around us. Focusing on a short-term planning horizon anchored on today’s circumstances may also lead us to miss out on the future economic opportunity that new technology areas, including next-generation high-tech Aquaculture, may present, while organisations and companies in Europe, the US, and Asia are already placing their bets on advancing in this field. However, there are also very positive signs: the interest overseas demonstrates that, for example, automated, onshore prawn farms are feasible and can attract funding. Additionally, the field of high-tech Aquaculture is still in its early stages, with few genuinely visionary projects so far, leaving room for companies like SHRMP.bio to develop new and unique intellectual property.
What’s more, there is a growing awareness of the broader agri-innovation opportunity in Australia, and a rising interest in Aquaculture and tech innovation among professionals from very diverse backgrounds. SHRMP.bio’s Public Choice Pitch Award earlier this year also indicates that its story appeals to Australian audiences, which encourages us to keep on building on this first momentum. I still don’t expect this to be a cocktail cruise, but again, that’s also a big part of why we do it. It’s going to be exciting.”
SHRMP.bio’s journey can be followed on their website http://thefutureofseafood.com and the company’s LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/company/futureofseafood.
Key Facts:
- Driven by the momentum generated through incubator programmes, Blue Ocean Ventures continues developing its spin-out company SHRMP.bio.
- High-tech Aquaculture may present a significant future economic opportunity through creation and ownership of key production technologies but Aquaculture is a challenging innovation environment.
- Based on SHRMP.bio’s experience, it appears that Australia has the potential to explore these significant but untapped economic opportunities. There is evidence of a growing recognition of the broader agri-innovation prospects in Australia, accompanied by an increasing interest in Aquaculture and technology innovation in general.
About Blue Ocean Ventures: Blue Ocean Ventures aims to become Australia’s leading Blue Venture Studio and establish a platform to seed opportunities into the local Blue Economy ecosystem. Blue Ocean’s mission is to find and develop solutions to address the UN’s Ocean Decade Challenges. Aside from financial gains and impact goals, Blue Ocean’s vision is also to contribute to the capability building needed for future manufacturing industries that drive high-tech R&D operations and create high-value product and technology export opportunities for Australia.
About SHRMP.bio: SHRMP.bio is an Australian early-stage blue bio-technology start-up developing the technologies to build a seafood manufacturing system ready for the challenges of the 21st Century. SHRMP.bio aims to combine elements of molecular biology, bioprocessing, and automation with the scale and simplicity of traditional aquafarming to make genuinely sustainable seafood possible.
If successful, SHRMP.bio has the potential to overcome current production challenges and take seafood production into urban or industrial areas close to markets, shift seafood production away from areas that are severely exposed to climate risks, and improve supply chain traceability from raw material to finished product. Furthermore, SHRMP.bio aims to offer solutions that will be needed by markets facing the escalating impacts of climate change and population growth, as SHRMP.bio’s technologies will facilitate the provision of essential animal-derived nutrients to the rapidly growing population in vast urbanised areas.