Blue Economy Success Stories

Ocean investments receive a fraction of total climate funding, despite the proven economic and environmental returns these solutions can generate.

In this edition of Blue Tide I’ll highlight success stories from different corners of the blue economy, including autonomous systems, biotech, infrastructure, ocean intelligence, and restoration.

📆 At the end, you’ll find a 2026 blue economy conference calendar I’ve been building to help plan for next year.

Saildrone designs wind- and solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles that can travel for months at sea, collecting high-resolution ocean data in places that are often too dangerous or expensive to reach.

Their vehicles have logged more than a million nautical miles and even sailed into a Category 4 hurricane to gather storm-core data.

A big part of their success comes from the breadth of their use cases, which includes climate modeling, carbon monitoring, fisheries management, and naval operations.

Lockheed Martin recently invested $50 million to arm Saildrone’s uncrewed surface vessels for U.S. Navy missions. Saildrone’s platforms are already used for maritime domain awareness tasks like tracking illegal fishing and drug trafficking, while the same technology continues to serve scientists, shipping companies, and weather agencies.

Saildrone shows what dual-use technology looks like in practice.

One of the most commercially successful ocean-biotech companies to date, Kerecis turns intact fish skin into medical grafts used for chronic wounds and tissue regeneration.

The material is biocompatible, reduces inflammation, and avoids the regulatory and ethical hurdles that come with mammalian-derived grafts.

In 2023, medical-device giant Coloplast acquired the company for up to $1.3 billion (with $1.2 billion upfront and another $100 million potential earn-out).

For an ocean-derived biomaterial to reach that scale and level of demand is a powerful case study for what blue biotech can become.

While not a startup in the traditional sense, Philly Shipyard shows how legacy maritime infrastructure can transform with the right investment.

South Korea’s Hanwha Group recently purchased the yard through a broader U.S.–Korea industrial agreement and committed $5 billion to overhaul the facility.

That investment is going into robotic welding, smart manufacturing systems, automated assembly, and the kind of digital infrastructure that could re-establish a modern commercial shipbuilding base in the U.S.

This kind of industrial modernization is a critical, but sometimes overlooked, piece of the blue-economy story.

In ocean data, few companies have built both scale and commercial demand as convincingly as Sofar Ocean.

Sofar Ocean operates one of the world’s largest networks of smart buoys, paired with a global forecasting model that delivers real-time ocean and weather intelligence.

Their data is used by commercial shipping fleets, offshore energy developers, scientists, and coastal planners.

They raised a $39 million Series B to expand this system further.

Sofar shows how ocean data can be both commercially valuable — improving routing efficiency, lowering emissions, reducing risk — and publicly valuable, strengthening our understanding of the planet.

Coral Vita has become one of the strongest examples of what happens when ecosystem restoration meets a scalable business model.

Coral Vita grows more resilient corals in on-land nurseries and restores degraded reefs in partnership with governments, communities, and developers.

Their assisted-evolution corals survive heat stress better, giving reef systems a fighting chance in a warming ocean.

They raised an $8 million Series A led by Builders Vision.

Unlike many restoration groups, Coral Vita is structured as a for-profit company, showing how ecosystem restoration can scale when it’s paired with the right business model.

I’ve been building a calendar of blue economy conferences for 2026 and thought it would be worth sharing for others who could find it helpful.

This is a living document so new events will be added throughout the year. I’m sure there are many that I’m missing, so please reach out if you know of any to add.

As always, thank you for reading Blue Tide. These stories show what happens when ocean innovation meets real demand. The market is widening, the use cases are multiplying, and the momentum is real.

🐬 Zané