StartBlue Cohort 3 Demo Day

This week I tuned into a recording of StartBlue Cohort 3 Demo Day from June, 1st 2024. During this Demo Day, seven startups pitched their startup followed by a few questions from the audeince. At the end of the pitches, the audience voted for their winner.

"StartBlue is a 6-month blue tech focused accelerator program launched in 2021 that is part of UC San Diego’s StartR accelerator program and offered in partnership by Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Rady School of Management. Since 2012, StartR has graduated 239 companies, and Scripps and Rady have worked together to support over 80 new environmental startups out of UC San Diego through entrepreneurship education and pitch competitions."

Learn more about StartBlue here.

Pitching Founders

Rowdy Malchow II from Blue Lotus Energy Corporation

• Manufacturing and selling portable wave energy converters.

Thomas Storwick from Coastal Carbon

• Developing AI models that enable satellites to see underwater.

🥇 Winner 🥇 Allison Cusick and Christian Johnson from FjordPhyto

• Pioneering polar citizen science, a social innovation enterprise that enhances tourist engagement in polar science and connects travelers to the importance of phytoplankton research on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Dhruv Mehta from Greenwater Scientific

• Producing natural, negative-emission air purifiers that harness the photosynthetic prowess of oceanic plankton and algae.

Bradley Abramson from New Tides Distillery

• Using a proprietary marine yeast, New Tides is able to ferment and distill ocean water directly without needing to desalinate it first.

Bryan Bui-Tuong and Marvin Magcamit from Parley Labs

• Developing Mollusks (Multisensor Location and Surveillance Cluster (MLSC)), a globally decentralized network of low-cost maritime sensors.

Bilgenur Baloglu from Wild Genomics, Inc.

• Precision pest monitoring through autonomous sampling and analysis of environmental DNA.

Key Takeaways

• Capital Intensive: These startups have billion-dollar potential, but they’ll need serious funding to scale.
• Data: The data these startups are collecting will be a valuable byproduct they can monetize.
• Business Support: During this Demo Day, the founders all discussed the value support their startups received from StartBlue. This reinforces the value that these programs give during each cohort.

Investment

💰 Coastal Carbon 💰

My Scoring

• Technology/Product: 9/10
• Founder and Team: 8.9/10
• Market Fit: 9.2/10
• Revenue Model: 9.1/10
• Pitch: 8.2/10

🎥 Watch the full recording here.