#89 - Venture Builders & De-Risking Ocean Innovation

Ocean innovation has momentum, but not yet the velocity we need. The sector sits on a surge of scientific progress and policy ambition (more to come with AI), yet the translation from research to investable ventures relatively abysmal.

Several factors contribute to this gap:

• Capital intensity (and lack of it): most ocean technologies require high upfront investment and long return horizons.

• Regulatory friction (classic EU bureaucracy eg): multi-layered permitting and environmental compliance extend timelines and discourage early investors.

• Fragmented pathways: startups often operate in isolation from ports, policymakers, or research infrastructure, limiting access to data and pilots.

• Long development cycles: hardware, infrastructure, and environmental testing push breakeven points far beyond what most VC models tolerate.

The result is a structural mismatch, early-stage ideas that are too technical & not commercial enough for investors. According to the OECD (2023), “scaling ocean innovation remains constrained by fragmented ecosystems and limited cross-sector funding mechanisms.”

Venture builders offer a potential painkiller. Rather than waiting for standalone startups to emerge, they create and co-develop ventures from within, embedding technical, operational, and business capacity from day one. This approach turns risk into a design variable and could form the scaffolding needed to turn more ocean ideas into investable, scalable ventures.

What Venture Builders Actually Do

Venture builders (or studios) are essentially startup factories, they originate ideas internally (sometimes externally), assemble teams, and provide the infrastructure to take those ideas from concept to company. Generally, unlike accelerators or incubators, which support external startups for a fixed period, venture builders create and co-own the businesses they launch.

Their core model revolves around a few simple levers:

• Internal ideation: ideas come from within the studio, or through structured partnerships with research labs, corporates, or investors.

• Shared infrastructure: legal, accounting, branding, fundraising, and product development all run through a central operational team, reducing friction and cost per venture.

• Hands-on co-founding: the studio acts as an active co-founder, not just a mentor. It provides talent, governance, and capital continuity.

• Investment-only variants: some studios operate purely as venture builders for hire, designing, funding, and spinning out companies for external partners (e.g. corporates, foundations, or family offices).

This last point is particularly relevant to the Blue Economy, where large incumbents like ports, logistics groups, and maritime engineering firms could (sometimes do) benefit from a “venture builder-as-a-service” model. Instead of relying on fragmented pilots, they could build strategically aligned ventures that tackle decarbonisation, digitalisation, or waste challenges within their own ecosystem.

It’s already happening in other sectors: climate-tech studios like Builders for Climate and Future Energy Ventures use similar structures to de-risk early-stage innovation and generate investable deal flow for corporate LPs.

In short, venture builders don’t just support startups, they engineer them. And more of that structural approach could be what’s needed to bridge the messy middle between ocean R&D and market-ready innovation.

 Why It Could Work for the Blue Economy

If any sector needs a more hands-on, systems-level approach to venture creation, it’s the Blue Economy. Ocean startups face a cocktail of complexity that few traditional investors or accelerators are built to handle.

A few realities stand out:

• Hardware-heavy ventures: most solutions involve engineering, materials, or infrastructure — far harder to scale than software.

• Regulatory drag: permitting, testing, and environmental clearances often take years, not months.

• Interdisciplinary skill gaps: founders need to navigate marine science, policy, and capital markets all at once.

• Long time horizons: many pilots run 3–5 years before hitting commercial readiness.

Venture builders can help compress that timeline by embedding cross-functional teams, engineers, business developers, and legal experts, within one repeatable framework. Instead of each startup rebuilding the same scaffolding, studios reuse systems, templates, and expertise across multiple ventures.

This approach also aligns incentives. When a studio co-owns what it builds, it’s invested in both impact and financial outcomes, making it easier to attract patient capital and corporate partnerships.

We’re already seeing early signals of this in adjacent sectors:

• Katapult Ocean and Ocean Born Foundation are experimenting with hybrid investment and venture-building models around ocean-positive technologies.

• Builders for Climate and Carbon13 apply the same logic to climate innovation, combining in-house venture creation with investor syndication.

• Energy Systems Catapult and EIT InnoEnergy act as quasi-builders in public-private form, spinning out ventures from within deep-tech and energy ecosystems.

De-Risking in Practice

At its core, the venture builder model is about risk management. Instead of reacting to uncertainty once a startup is already in the market, builders bake de-risking into every stage, from ideation to pilot.

Play out:

• Technical risk: shared R&D capacity and prototyping resources mean ideas are tested faster, with consistent quality and lower burn rates.

• Regulatory risk: in-house legal and compliance teams handle environmental permits and maritime regulations across multiple ventures, creating reusable knowledge and smoother approval cycles.

• Market risk: early co-design with industry partners (ports, shipping operators, aquaculture firms) ensures ventures solve real problems with clear adoption paths.

• Funding risk: studios maintain continuous investor dialogue, securing bridge capital internally rather than forcing each venture to fundraise from scratch.

The portfolio structure itself adds another layer of resilience. By running several ventures in parallel, a studio can share data, repurpose technology, and recycle learnings across projects, reducing the binary “win or die” nature typical of deeptech startups.

Closing Remarks

The Blue Economy doesn’t lack ideas, it lacks build systems. Venture builders offer turning innovation into a bit more of a process rather than a gamble.

But for this model a few things need to align:

• Patient, aligned capital: most Blue Economy ventures won’t fit the classic VC timeline. Studios need investors comfortable with blended returns — financial and environmental.

• Shared validation infrastructure: access to testbeds, ports, and data-sharing agreements should be treated as public–private assets, not barriers.

• Cross-sector collaboration: governments, corporates, and research bodies each hold part of the solution. Venture builders can be the connective tissue that brings them into one deal flow.

None of this is a silver bullet, but it’s a shift in how we build rather than how we fund. By embedding structure, continuity, and shared capability, venture builders can help de-risk ocean innovation from the inside out.

If the last decade was about discovering new ocean technologies, the next might be about learning how to build them better, repeatably, investable, and at scale, especially with AI large scale implementation around the corner.

Peace out, go build!

H