The marine tech startup taking a dive into aquaculture

What’s your background, and what inspired you to start a marine tech company?

By training I'm a mechanical engineer but, from my first job out of school as an engineer on educational tall ships, I have learned a lot about oceanography and marine engineering. Following that job, I went back to school to get into marine renewable energy and then started MarineSitu.

Since 2021, myself and our two co-founders, Paul Murphy and Mitchell Scott, basically have been full time with the company and we've been growing our team as we get more customers and contracts. Although our initial focus was on monitoring for tidal and wave energy devices, we've been expanding into other blue economy applications, such as aquaculture, which is a great opportunity for underwater monitoring.

What is your technology, and how is it deployed for aquaculture?

We've primarily focused on underwater monitoring cameras, but we also use imaging sonars, hydrophones and Doppler profilers to do sensor fusion between the different modalities and get a better understanding of what's happening in these very complex environments.

So far, to us the most obvious application of our technology in aquaculture would be for biomass estimation. The stereo camera systems that we typically deploy allow us to take very accurate 3D measurements of the fish.

Additionally, with the machine learning models that we have, we can carry out feeding assessments – looking at either the behavioural patterns of the fish during feeding, or looking for the feed pellets falling through the bottom of the pen. Beyond this, I think we are most interested in developing behavioural monitoring for health purposes.

Obviously, with Atlantic salmon farming, monitoring for sea lice is a big issue and something that we'd love to try and demonstrate as well.

What makes your technology unique?

We have been trying to take advantage of the latest camera technologies and robotics technologies to really drive cost down, to make it more approachable to a wider range of industries. Our initial grant request from the US Department of Energy was to make low cost, user friendly environmental monitoring tools, and it was a mandate that we had to bring the cost down by at least 50 percent compared to anything else on the market.

Secondly the rugged and reliable nature of our hardware is unique. We had a very lengthy background of designing and developing marine instrumentation to survive in very harsh marine environments. Not only that, but our original designs were for marine energy applications, where you have extraordinary amounts of energy and just very, very harsh environments for underwater instrumentation and, over the last decade, we've basically done many multi-month deployments at these sites and worked through a lot of the issues and bugs with the hardware that I think people in other areas are still trying to work through.

For example, we've come up with ways to basically eliminate corrosion and do anti-fouling mitigation for systems that are deployed for long periods of time. So, we've solved a lot of the reliability issues with the hardware.

Thirdly, we offer a full turnkey solution with all the data management as well. We can basically provide customised machine learning models for a specific site, a specific camera, through the software pipeline that we've developed. This is important because we realised how dynamic marine environments are. It requires a lot of customisation for each deployment as it's very hard to take data from one site and make it work at another.

What challenges have you faced as you established your business?

The biggest challenge that we faced has been the long sales cycle for these industries in general. I think from everything I've heard that's the case in aquaculture, but also in marine energy. Deployment of these systems takes a long time and a lot of planning. And so, to build a company around it, you need to have a lot of runway and buffer for projects to get delayed or cancelled. That poses a challenge for a small business, obviously. Thankfully, we've been able to mitigate that basically by being very flexible as a company and having good government funding through grants.

What achievements are you most proud of?

As far as deployments go, we had a system that completed a two-year deployment monitoring a wave energy converter in Oahu, Hawai’i, and when we recovered the system at the end of the two years everything looked great. We cleaned up the biofouling that was on the system and we honestly could put it straight back in the water if we wanted to, essentially. That system included our components as well as some other instruments, and none of the other instruments really fared as well as ours did, which was a nice kind of accomplishment and really just comes back to all the effort we put in to making the design really rugged and resistant to these environments.

As far as building the company goes, I think we have a very fun and dynamic team, and we all work really well together. We are still a small company, but we are growing and everybody's really excited about what we're doing, which feels really good.

How is your business funded, and will you be seeking funding in the near future?

To date we have been entirely funded by government research and development grants and customer contracts. Our recent investment from Hatch is actually our first equity-style investment that we have taken, and we took that because we see great opportunity in the aquaculture space and the opportunity with Hatch to enter that space.

As far as current funding, we have good contracts for the next couple of years and, if things go as planned, we won't necessarily need to take more funding. I think the way we are thinking about future funding, it is going to be based on our needs and scale. Right now we're still pretty small scale and we don’t have that many systems deployed, but if we do get into the aquaculture space and a customer likes what we do and wants to significantly scale up, then we would need money to be able to do that. That's where I think we would really be looking for a strategic investor.

What do you hope to gain from Hatch Blue's Crest accelerator programme?

What we hope to gain is an understanding of the aquaculture industry. It's been a great programme so far already and we've already learned a tonne about what people have been doing with cameras and monitoring in the sector. Since visiting Norway and several salmon farming operations with Hatch in mid-September, we've gained a better understanding of our unique value proposition for aquaculture, which relates to how easily we can adapt our models to know species and farming conditions, and also the best opportunities for us to enter this space.

Ultimately, if we can make the connections through Hatch to a potential customer or somebody who's willing to do a demonstration or pilot project with us, that's the main goal.

Where do you see MarineSitu in ten years time?

I would hope that, at a minimum, we will have grown our company by two or three times regarding our number of employees, and that we would be making probably a few million dollars a year in revenue. That could potentially be a lot more if the right situation presents itself and things continue to grow. We're not necessarily looking to be the moonshot. We're looking to really make a difference, provide exceptional tools and enjoy what we do.