I interviewed Anton Voskoboynikov, co-founder and CEO of Softseaweed (*), a company established to support seaweed farmers in developing their business sustainably and profitably.
Challenges and Solutions
What prompted you to launch?
I started working with seaweed farming in 2015 when everyone expected it to take off quickly. At that time we participated in several research projects with other seaweed farmers and research institutions, and tested production at two locations in cooperation with SINTEF.
What we learned from comparing production results at 9-10 locations was that there are correlations between environmental parameters at different locations and biomass production that we don’t quite understand yet.
For example:
Biofouling. The time and rate of biofouling that breaks down the seaweed was different. While we still had a lot of seaweed left in the South of Norway in August, some locations in the North didn’t have anything left by that time. Was it because of the temperature even though it was supposed to be higher in the South? Seaweed grows very fast in spring so understanding how much later you can harvest before the risk of biofouling can increase revenues by 10-20%.
Growth rates. There was visually more seaweed on one side of the 200m line than on the other. Was it because it was closer to the shore and more sheltered? Or was it because of other parameters? Can a different placement of the farm give us more biomass?
Seeding time. We set out our lines in January and they grew to over 1m in June. Some farmers thought the results could be better if you seed earlier even though you can’t see any growth until January-February. The questions are: how much earlier? at what temperature? and how would it affect biomass production?
From participating in different projects and direct dialog with other seaweed farmers we understood some of the challenges of scaling the industry. To scale seaweed farmers would need large customers and investors. And both of them would require that farmers have control, and can reliably replicate the results at different locations.
At this point, I met Morten Kroslid who had started what eventually became SoftSeaweed and together with other people who had strong ideas on how to provide seaweed farmers with the data so that they could make the right decisions and scale profitably, we decided to launch. We decided that we wanted to support other seaweed farmers by providing solutions that can make their lives easier.
What problem(s) are you solving?
The problem today is that seaweed farmers need data to optimize growth and to give investors and large customers security about what these farmers can grow. Data collection at sea is expensive and time-consuming. All tools we saw so far were made for aquaculture or oil and gas and the majority of seaweed farmers couldn’t afford it. Those who could, also had to spend too much time choosing and setting up the right equipment.
We help seaweed farmers with affordable, automated, easy-to-use solutions for location-specific data collection, which will give them an understanding of how to optimize growth by choosing the right location, and time for seeding and harvesting. It will also help them to optimize operations, reduce the need for regular visits to the platform, save time and money on data collection, and give them a tool for risk management.
The farmers can show their investors and customers the location of the platform, the seaweed, and the conditions around it during the whole production cycle on their mobile or desktop.
In the words of our client, Scottish company Atlantic Mariculture: “Softseaweed system provides farmers with the means to monitor multiple environmental parameters relevant to seaweed cultivation on one unit making data collection easier to manage and maintain. The collection of data is fully integrated with the cloud-based platform providing a safe and reliable data collection system“.
Business Model
What is your business model?
We offer seaweed farmers to rent our SoftsSense sensors, removing the investment barrier. Access to a part of our SoftInsight platform with data from some third-party databases is free, while access to the main functions is based on a monthly fee, which will be flexible and depend on the features the farmer will choose.
What’s your current greatest challenge?
As usual, resources. There are many things we would like to add to our solution already now, but it takes time and we have to prioritize.
Which are / will be your products?
We provide seaweed farmers with SoftsSense sensors for location-specific monitoring and the SaaS solution SoftInsight for data collection, analysis, and farm management. We are working on more sensors and software products that will help seaweed farmers optimize operations and make it easier to scale.
Future Plans
What is immediately next for your company?
This season we started deliveries of the 3rd generation of our sensor package, internationally. The next step is to add more relevant data from the 3rd party databases and more sensor clusters so that seaweed farmers can pick and choose the right combination of sensors without breaking their budget.
We are also adding more functions to the farm management platform and will focus on tools for data analysis.
It will enable us to provide seaweed farmers with an overview of the benchmark from the industry. Instead of only learning from their own experience. Seaweed farmers will be able to see anonymized aggregated data such as a combination of parameters for the top five performing seaweed farms. It will help the whole industry to learn and grow faster.
Are you satisfied with your rate of progress?
Usually not. We set quite ambitious goals and predictably, it takes more time to achieve them than planned. At the same time, we are happy with the solution our tech team has managed to build so far in a very short time. Now when the core systems are ready it will be easier to move forward and add more and more functions that we believe will provide a lot of value to seaweed farmers.
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Charles Bukowski
(*) I am an early investor in SoftSeaweed.