Ocean Exchange 2026 filled Fort Lauderdale from October 25 to 27 with founders, scientists and funders who all want the same thing: a healthier ocean and a blue economy that pays for itself. Ocean Exchange awards non-dilutive grant prizes, including the Neptune Prize and collegiate awards, to solutions that make the ocean healthier and more resilient. For early-stage teams, that kind of capital is rare, and the room reflected it.
Congratulations to yesterday's award winners: Subtidal, Ignition Packaging, Beam Sea, and AIMM. Special shout out to Subtidal and Beam Sea for winning the Wayne and Lucretia Winer Award for direct impact and applications for Florida.
Here are ten companies that stood out, what they build, and why it matters. Each one links to the team's own site, and we have linked founders' LinkedIn profiles where we could verify them.
Ocean Alliance: Drones That Help Free Entangled Whales
If one pitch stayed with us, it was Ocean Alliance. Chris Davis presented the work of a nonprofit that has protected whales since 1971, and the through-line is a simple idea: study and rescue whales without chasing them. The organization is led by CEO Iain Kerr.
Ocean Alliance is best known for SnotBot, a drone program that flies through a whale's blow to collect the exhaled breath and mucus. That sample carries DNA, hormones, microbiome data and stress indicators, so researchers learn about a whale's health without darting it or crowding it with a boat. You can read more at whale.org/snotbot.
The new chapter is whale disentanglement. Fishing gear and ghost gear kill thousands of whales every year, and today's rescues are dangerous for the people involved and often unsuccessful. Ocean Alliance has built a portable drone toolkit that lets authorized response teams assess an entanglement, drop a tracking buoy and place a cutting grapple on trailing gear from a safe distance. The hardware includes a 3D-printed three-blade cutting grapple, an auto-release, a drogue-chute system, laser-altimeter targeting and a compact VHF/Iridium tracking buoy.
The track record is concrete. In 2026 the team reported 44 open-ocean test flights, all core functions demonstrated, repeated cuts of real entanglement gear within minutes, NOAA Level 2 disentanglement certification, and five buoy configurations confirmed by satellite. The next milestone is a live-whale response, and the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, which winters off Florida, is exactly the animal this work is meant to help.
One more detail we liked: the team designs these tools to be used free of charge, because more responders using them is better for whales. Learn more at whale.org. One thing I'd love to see them do is figure out how to scale this business using a model like MANG or 4OCEAN. People would love to support this in a consumer-driven way. I think they could 10x or 100x their impact by doing so.
AC Biode: Circlite From Coal Ash
Tadashi Kubo, CEO of AC Biode, presented Circlite, an antibacterial and antiviral composite material made from coal ash or biomass ash combined with titanium dioxide. It turns an industrial waste stream into a functional material with uses in water filtration, marine antifouling and indoor air and water treatment. Antifouling matters to every boat owner, and a surface that resists growth without leaching harsh biocides is a direction the marine industry needs. Visit acbiode.com.
AIMM: Cleaner Water, Faster
Lauren Brown pitched AIMsorb from AIMM Labs, a sustainable, biochar-derived carbon sorbent engineered to capture PFAS ("forever chemicals") and heavy metals from wastewater and municipal water streams. The pitch is that it works as a drop-in replacement for granular activated carbon, at lower cost and higher efficiency. In the recording, Lauren described very fast contaminant uptake, which is what makes the material attractive for utilities that have to treat water at volume. Learn more at aimmlabs.com. This was actually really cool.
Amphitrite: Seeing the Currents
Amphitrite, with teams in Paris and Halifax and represented by Alexandre Stegner, builds ocean data intelligence. It combines multi-satellite data (altimetry, optical and sea surface temperature) with physics-informed AI to deliver high-resolution surface currents and drift forecasts. Maritime routing, offshore energy and search and rescue all benefit when a forecast resolves the eddies and fronts that coarse models miss. Better routing also means lower fuel burn and lower emissions. Visit amphitrite.fr.
Chitelix: Shells to Value
From Tunisia, Mohamed Khemiri and the Chitelix team upcycle crustacean shells from blue crab and shrimp processing into premium chitosan and biopolymers. Those materials go into organic agriculture, seed coatings, bio-fungicides and natural water clarification. The story is a good one for the blue economy: the blue swimming crab is an invasive species problem in the Mediterranean, and Chitelix turns it into a raw material. The company also sees Florida as an expansion beachhead, where shell waste from seafood processing is otherwise landfilled. Visit chitelix.com.
Subtidal: Early Warning for Harmful Algal Blooms
Casey Wilson of Subtidal, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spinoff, presented real-time autonomous water quality monitoring for lakes, reservoirs and coastal waters. Solar buoys track conditions continuously and give communities early warning of cyanobacteria before a full toxic bloom develops. Florida knows what blooms cost, and continuous data is far more useful than an occasional water sample. Visit subtidal.com.
Lumarinescent: A Better Glow Stick for Longline Fishing
Gianna Galezo of Lumarinescent are going after a problem most people never think about. Pelagic longline fishing uses single-use chemical glow sticks, which create plastic waste and chemical leakage at sea. Luminescent offers a reusable, refillable, marine-safe bioluminescent alternative that costs a fraction of traditional chem-lights. It is a small object with a large footprint, and a clear case where a cheaper product is also the cleaner one. I think it has bigger applications for the world. Think about all the glow sticks we use in various different applications, including Halloween.
AmHyTech: Ammonia at Ambient Conditions
Mona Maleka and Morteza Sarparast of AmHyTech tackle the last-mile problem for ammonia, a leading candidate for zero-carbon shipping fuel. Ammonia is normally stored with cryogenic refrigeration or high-pressure tanks. AmHyTech's technology stores and transports liquid ammonia at ambient conditions, which the team says improves safety by more than 1,000 times and lowers capital cost. If ammonia is going to fuel ships, heavy transport and agriculture, infrastructure like this has to exist. Visit amhytech.com.
What We Took Away
Across ten very different pitches, a few patterns repeated. Teams are turning waste (ash, shells, chemical glow sticks) into products. Data is getting local, whether that means ocean currents, algal blooms or flooded streets. And the most promising conservation work, like Ocean Alliance's drones, lowers the risk for the people and animals involved.
The pitches also landed against the backdrop of Fort Lauderdale's wider marine economy. With the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show (FLIBS) drawing over 100,000 visitors, +1,300 boats on display, and generating $1.778 billion in statewide economic impact ($694.5 million in sales by Florida companies and $823.5 million in exhibitor sales), plus the launch of RefitX at Bahia Mar dedicated to shipyards, trades, designers, and manufacturers, the scale of commercial marine activity in the region is immense. Connecting ocean-tech innovation directly to that commercial marine engine is where sustainable impact turns into economic scale.
At Founding Blue we believe the ocean economy will be built by teams like these. We will keep following them, and we encourage you to visit their sites and learn more.