Scoot Science Unveils Revolutionary Analytics Platform for Investors
Jonathan LaRiviere, Scoot Science's CEO and co-founder, is a graduate of UCSC's Ocean Science's Department.
You may remember Scoot Science was in the first cohort of Santa Cruz Accelerates (circa 2017). With our seed investment, Scoot Science was able to purchase their first computers and get to work. Their mission: to provide meaningful data to fish farms above and below the waterline. Since then, the startup has received global interest, successful funding, collected realtime data from over 3,800 sites around the world, and has grown from 2 to nearly 20 employees. According to Jonathan LaRiviere / CEO, Scoot Science closed partnerships with the “big fish” of fish farms including Grieg Seafood ASA, a global leader in salmon farming and sustainable farming practices. All the while, Scoot Science has been building massive data sets to give fisheries and countries deeper insights into aquaculture.
Farmed vs Wild
Before you shake your head and run off to buy wild caught fish, forget what you learned about fish farms in the 90s. Times have changed. Fish farms in the US and Canada are now more environmentally safe than even the most rigid legislation would desire. All fish, wild or farmed, will have some contaminates such as PCBs. Farmed fish could eventually reduce contaminates. But let’s get on with meat of the story.
Green Sharpe
Salmon farming has, for decades, offered extraordinary returns. The global market for aquaculture: $180 billion and is expected to reach $245.2 billion by 2027. Moreover, those returns come from a sector where better sustainability translates directly to better profit. But the industry's unique set of ocean risks has kept capital on the sidelines...until now.
Today, Scoot Science has taken the next step in ocean analytics: Green Sharpe.
Green Sharpe is a measure of impact-and-risk-adjusted returns, enabling institutional investors to achieve sustainability and profits with remarkable ocean-based businesses. Why is this so important? Investors have been reluctant to invest in industries and startups where risk vs return can not be accurately forecasted. For ocean-based fish farms, the risks include extreme ocean events like marine heat waves, low oxygen conditions, and other types of underwater weather that are becoming more frequent with climate change. Scoot Science’s oceanographers and economists use innovative modeling to outline the frequency and severity of these events and quantify the carbon emissions impact of a fish farm.
Scoot Science’s revolutionary analytics platform enables institutional investors to find investment opportunities that historically offered:
Risk-adjusted returns in the top quintile of all US or European stocks across recent decades.
A historical Green Sharpe that is 31 times larger than US agriculture and livestock as a whole.
A clear opportunity to outperform already impressive sector average benchmarks (EY estimates that Norway's salmon farmer produced a compounded return on capital employed of 24% over the ten years to 2019).
Scoot's SeaState dashboard is used by salmon farms to manage the on-water operations and understand the surrounding ocean environment. Ocean forecasts in SeaState are increasing the lead-time that farms have for extreme underwater weather events that can harm the fish. With more lead-time for large temperature swings, runoff, and low oxygen conditions, the farms are able to take the steps needed to protect the fish. SeaState is increasing the survivability at these farms and making aquaculture even more sustainable.
Healthier = Better Investment
For the first time, Scoot Science is showing investors that fish farms with low carbon Emission Intensity (environmentally better) have a lower risk than farms with a large carbon footprint. Better for the environment, healthier returns!
