British Columbia, Canada-based cultivated kelp company Cascadia Seaweed has announced a successful Series A funding round, raising CAN 4 million (USD 2.9 million; EUR 2.8 million) of the CAN 7 million (USD 5 million; EUR 4.8 million) it sought.
“We are thrilled with the support from both new and existing investors,” CEO Michael Williamson said. “We’ve built a vertically integrated business that delivers real environmental and economic benefits, and this funding will enable us to scale up and provide surety of supply of innovative inputs to our customers while contributing to more resilient food production in North America.”
The company, which cultivates kelp as a nature-based solution to climate change and food insecurity, has scored funding from WWF Impact (the impact investing arm of the World Wildlife Fund US), Vere Ventures, Potato Impact Partners, Venture Lab Climate Impact Fund, Realize Impact, the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia, and Norfolk Green Ventures, among others. Only 11 percent of the funding in this round came from Canadian investors.
Founded in 2019, Cascadia Seaweed is a vertically-integrated company producing seaweed-based biostimulants and livestock feed that offer a natural alternative for farmers looking to reduce their dependence on chemical fertilizers, while contributing to reduced agricultural emissions.
The company grows native species of seaweed on low-impact ocean farms owned by coastal First Nations communities, then harvests that seaweed and manufactures products for regenerative agriculture.
The Series A funds will go towards the production of a commercial-sized seaweed biorefinery where the company will expand production of biomass, as well as broaden sales and marketing efforts of its liquid kelp extracts, biostimulants, and livestock products.
According to Cascadia here are over 10,000 different seaweed species worldwide, and 30 species of kelp alone live in British Columbia. Like terrestrial forests, underwater kelp forests provide shelter and food to the ecosystem while capturing carbon and producing oxygen, mitigating acidification and absorbing excess nutrients. In this way, the copmany said, ocean-cultivated kelp like that produced by Cascadia provides ecosystems to the waters where it is grown.
“Cascadia’s approach of working with First Nations communities to bring seaweed farming to scale is the first of its kind," WWF-US Vice President of Impact Investing and Ecosystems Services Paul Dobbins said. "This model can provide benefits for both coastal communities and the environment and when scaled, cultivated seaweed can reduce the footprint of our global food system by providing a nutritious source of food and livestock feed with less land and resource inputs.”
