Location: Waterloo, Canada

How we met: We originally met at a conference, and encouraged them to attend our Ocean MBA.

Propeller theme: Ocean Carbon

Propeller investment stage: Pre-seed

Kelly Zheng and Thomas Storwick stumbled on an interesting opportunity. Kelly was finishing her PHD work at U. Waterloo on mechatronics engineering. Tom was finishing his masters in chemical engineering and became enthralled by seaweed farming. Together, they asked, what if you could use Kelly’s research to make seaweed farming exponentially easier and more lucrative? Coastal Carbon was born on this premise. 

• Why we love the founders – Thomas and Kelly are insatiable, charismatic and deeply mission oriented. They could be doing many things with their brilliance-and they are turning it to a healthier and more productive ocean. 
• What’s novel about Coastal Carbon’s tech – They make the underwater visible, from space(!). 
• Why we’re excited about this market – Coastal carbon can be the unlock for a lot of data collection, but even more so-giving the tools to industry and individual ocean operators/farmers to verify high-quality supply. 
• How impactful Coastal Carbon could be – Coastal Carbon is just a few months into training their models with ocean data, but they could feasibly make a large part of the epipelagic visible.

Learn more about Coastal Carbon at https://www.coastalcarbon.ai/