March 23, 2023

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

When SWEN Capital Partners launched its Blue Ocean Fund in September 2021 at the World Conservation Congress, in scientific partnership with France’s leading oceanographic institute Ifremer, the fund had an initial target of €120 million (US$130.7 million).

Now, the sustainable solutions investment manager announced a close for the fund at €170 million (US$185.2 million), exceeding its initial target by €50 million (US$54.4 million).

“With this final closing, Blue Ocean is propelled to the forefront and becomes the world’s largest fund dedicated to innovation in marine health,” said Jérôme Delmas, CEO, SWEN Capital Partners. “Its oversubscription testifies to the growing interest of our investors in this essential field and, more broadly, in SWEN CP’s ESG/impact strategy. I would like to thank our partners for their trust as well as all the SWEN CP teams without whom nothing would be possible.”

More than 85 percent of the fund’s total capital commitments are from institutional investors from Europe and the U.S. comprising pension funds, insurance companies, banks, sovereign funds, and family offices. The most recent round included Abeille Assurances, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the insurance firms MACIF and MAIF, the banking group Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Bpifrance, Builders Vision, Ferd, the Planet Ocean Fund, and Ifremer.

“We are thrilled with the final close of SWEN’s Blue Ocean fund for the regeneration of ocean health,” said Peter Bryant, program director, Builders Initiative. “Builders was one of the first to commit to SWEN because we recognized the potential of the team’s vision for putting capital to work in exciting new ocean businesses, and this final close gives the SWEN team more dry powder to continue its great work in ocean health investing.”

The fund’s investment thesis called for it to finance 20-25 startups working within the sustainable aquaculture, ocean data, plant- and cell-based seafood, single-use plastic alternatives, renewable marine energy, and the decarbonization of marine transportation. 

“The ocean is one of the main engines of the climate and a sanctuary for biodiversity on our planet,” said Christian Lin, managing director, SWEN Blue Ocean Fund. “Our fund provides investors with the opportunity to support unique companies that help tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis at a systems level, while targeting competitive market returns. We believe ocean impact investing has a major role to play in the global movement to restore the planet and our relationship with it, and we want to play our part.”

By 2030, the blue economy is expected to grow at double the rate of the rest of the economy, however, the extractive nature of our relationship with the world’s oceans and its wildlife continues to lessen marine biodiversity and negatively impact habitats. Additionally, only a fraction of the current marine enterprises in operation are working to reduce these outcomes.

Growth in global demand for seafood has increased at 3.2 percent per year since 1960, outpacing the 1 percent annual growth in global population, according to Philippe de Lapérouse, co-head and managing director with HighQuest Consulting. Over the same time period, per capita consumption of seafood has more than doubled from 10 kilograms per person to more than 20 kilograms per person today – an unsustainable dynamic that is creating a scenario that will see global fisheries collapse before 2050, according to Good Catch.

Blue Ocean Fund has been working to stem the tide, and has built a portfolio of nine investments so far that includes:

~ ECOsubsea – a Norway-based leading provider of environmentally friendly in-water hull cleaning services to the worldwide shipping industry. 

~ BIBAK – A French software tech company simplifying reusable packaging services.

~ BlueNav – A French company converting any combustible engine boat to a hybrid electric one. 

~ OptoScale – A Norway-based tech startup developing accurate and real-time fish biomass measurement and sea lice counting. 

~ NatureMetrics – A UK-based provider of biodiversity monitoring solutions through environmental eDNA surveys and metabarcoding. 

~ Spinergie – A French software company using big data analytics to help the marine transport industry significantly reduce field consumption and carbon emissions. 

But SWEN Capital does more than provide investments. In 2021 it, along with its partners Ocean Hub Africa, Katapult Ocean, and Conservation International Ventures, co-founded the 1000 Ocean Start-ups Coalition, an initiative now hosted by the WEF that brings together incubators, accelerators, matching platforms, and VCs with a unified objective to scale at least 1,000 transformative startups to restore ocean health by the end of the Ocean Decade and to mainstream ocean health investing. 

With SWEN Capital Partners as co-chair of the Steering Committee, in June 2022 the 100 Ocean Startups Coalition, with support from SYSTEMIQ, created the Ocean Impact Navigator, a new open-source impact KPI framework designed to simplify, harmonize, and strengthen impact measurement and reporting for the Ocean Impact Innovation ecosystem. 

SWEN Capital explained that this tool was created to help ocean entrepreneurs and their investors to identify innovations with the potential for real impact, as well as to aggregate and communicate progress toward a sustainable ocean economy. 

“As a sanctuary of biodiversity, the ocean produces over 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe and plays a crucial role in the fight against climate change, absorbing 93 percent of the excess heat produced by humans,” said Olivier Raybaud, managing director of the SWEN Blue Ocean Fund in October 2022. 

“Added to this is the economic challenge of potential losses due to the shortage of seafood products and the rise in sea level if ocean health decline and climate change are not addressed. Through the Blue Ocean fund and the work being done by 1000 Ocean start-ups we hope to contribute to reverse these trends by financing companies supporting ocean regeneration.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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