Neuston Biosystems Inc. aus Toronto | Agriculture | Green and cleantech

Accessible water and microalgal biomass, afforded by advanced manufacturing, biosecured with advanced materials, scaled through decoupled design.

Achievements

Team

Prototype

Users

Partners

Revenue

Investors

What we offer

PROBLEM: Aquaculture feed and human nutrition industries are increasingly using microalgae biomass as a sustainable, carbon neutral food source. The carbon-neutral life cycle of microalgae products can only be realized with carbon-negative production in photobioreactors (PBRs), which achieve a narrow range of productivities ~ 0.5 - 10 g/L/day in all combinations of reactor design and cultivated species to-date. Such low productivities highlight the importance of lifetime reactor CAPEX and OPEX in facility economics. The high, up-front CAPEX of traditional PBR materials is a highly acknowledged financial barrier to establishing new production facilities, while economic production in existing facilities is inhibited by dominating OPEX of labor to harvest/process biomass, electricity to circulate/aerate the microalgal culture, and downtime due to contamination and crashes followed by extremely time-consuming, multiple weeks-long staged restart of the culture. A PBR of radically different design may be able to mitigate these costs while achieving similar productivities and enhanced scalability.

SOLUTION: Through 17 years of microfluidic hardware development and a photobioreactor design PhD, the founder of Neuston has conceptualized a radically different photobioreactor based on eco-friendly, literature-proven TLR 3 materials that can be produced in scale, which will greatly reduce CAPEX and OPEX while achieving competitive productivities and solve key issues of traditional reactor designs, such as water loss, contamination risk management, outdoor environmental fluctuations, and resource-limited deployability.

Target group

The first target is clean water generation by developing an atmospheric water harvester MVP for individuals/homes, and later, using that developed tech, a photobioreactor MVP enabling a transition to biosecure microalgae feed for aquaculture operations, which commonly suffer from economic, supply, or sustainability deficiencies resulting from their use of fish feed + fish oils.

Challenges

In chronological order: Fundraising, CxO hire, mentorship & advisor sourcing, patent applications, establishing laboratory space, prototyping core tech (creating a flexible, universal testing platform and a variety of test designs), and creating an atmospheric water harvester initial MVP.

Our Story

After graduating in microalgal photobioreactor design, in 2017 Scott became employee #3 in a pre-seed high-tech startup in Alberta, Canada. There, he got a grounds-eye view of a hardware company's maturation, and helped it through governance, product strategy, technical sales, and developing much of its core tech through two funding rounds. This company has grown to 50+ employees and retains large, international clients. Simultaneously, in Alberta, Scott continued photobioreactor research after-hours in a DIY home lab, building the practical and theoretical framework for a reactor design that uses literature-proven advanced materials. In Dec 2023 Neuston Biosystems was founded, and in the 6 months to-date (now spring 2024), markets and competitor gaps have been validated, a chorus of Ontario aquaculture fisheries and international industrial photobioreactor experts have voiced their support, prototypes are being developed toward patent applications, and fundraising toward onboarding an exec team has begun. Scott is passionate to form this business toward realizing low cost, low power, reliable photobioreactors that make algae biomass more commercially available and biosecure for humans and in low-resource settings. But he needs your help! Please see Jobs.