Sustainable fishing start-up, OceanMind spins out from the Satellite Applications Catapult
Marketing
The Satellite Applications Catapult is delighted to announce its OceanMind business unit is now an independent, not-for-profit company. This pioneering new entity will continue its outstanding international contribution to the growing global challenges of tackling illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.
This success story for the UK satellite applications sector is an exemplar of the dynamic innovation environment which exists in the UK today. ÿAn environment which the Satellite Applications Catapult has fostered and which provides the framework for UK companies, supported by world-leading R&D, to solve market challenges and rapidly bring products to market, based on satellite-enabled data.
For the past three years, the Satellite Applications Catapult and the Pew Charitable Trusts have supported OceanMind to develop a market-leading service based on the observation of fishing vessels, by applying advance machine learning techniques to the latest satellite datasets.ÿ This capability is now enabling organisations around the world to enforce fisheries policies more effectively and provide global supply chains with the vital information they need to source more responsibly.
OceanMind has delivered services for customers in Thailand, Chile and Costa Rica, and continues to work on enforcement support for the British Blue Belt of marine protected areas.ÿ It also works on global supply chain challenges with international fisheries and global retailers.
The move to independence has been made possible with funding from the Draper Richards Kaplan foundation, a global venture philanthropy firm supporting early stage, high impact social enterprises. Alongside this, OceanMind will continue to work with the Satellite Applications Catapult to ensure success in this next stage of development.
Stuart Martin, CEO of the Satellite Applications Catapult said:
“We are delighted that a business we helped conceive, and have watched going from strength to strength, is now ready to start on its own journey. OceanMind is a huge success story for the Catapult – it has developed a unique product and service offer, found customers from leading international brands and is an example of everything we strive to achieve at the Catapult in our work to grow the UK space sector.ÿ Today marks a great achievement for the OceanMind team, and one of many planned spin-outs from the Catapult. My congratulations go to them as we wish them every success for the future.”
Nick Wise, Founder and CEO of OceanMind said
“This an extremely exciting time. What started three years ago as a demonstration of satellite and machine learning capability to combat Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing under the Eyes on the Seas project is now a complete service offering, providing intelligence and analytical capacity to fisheries authorities, and independent third-party validation of seafood traceability in the seafood supply chain.”
