 Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sockian. We are still on site at IndieBio's demo day number eight. We are now talking with Paul Schmitzberger. Hello. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited for this. See your Blue Planet ecosystems. That's right. That's right. And you just gave the talk on the main stage. What were you pitching? Well, how you turn sunlight into seafood. That's what our company is doing. And unpack this more for us. Sunlight into seafood. Yeah, sure. So basically what we do is we replicate an aquatic ecosystem. So we start by producing microalgae in tubular photobioreactors. This microalgae is fed to zooplankton. What we displayed out there was a species called apnea, which is internal natural food for fish and then for shrimp. Okay. And so let's start breaking this down piece by piece. So you said the first one was microalgae. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And yeah, so teach us about how do you source microalgae and you're growing that just in water in the first chamber? Exactly. So basically microalgae supply about 50% of the world's oxygen, right? It's quite a fascinating organism that is the foundation of almost any food chain that you find in the world, or at least in water. And they are really, really good in transforming sunlight into biomass. They're really good if the conditions are right. They take in CO2, break it apart, break water apart and recombine it to beautiful molecules that you know as fatty acids and proteins and all of that stuff. This is what they are evolved for. And if you put them in the right conditions, their population just explodes. Whoa. And because phytoplankton also are a massive contributor to the oxygenation of the world. True. So if I'm saying microalgae, it's also phytoplankton, right? Oh, so phytoplankton is included in? Exactly. Oh, microalgae. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Botanists argue what is microalgae. If they even plant, we are using this pretty unscientific and mean both, actually. Okay, okay. And so then, okay, under the right conditions. So what are the conditions for the microalgae? So for the most part, it's light. It's an energy source, obviously. But it's also carbon dioxide, CO2, stuff that we actually want to get rid of. But also other compounds like nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, stuff like this. But in fairly low quantities, actually. Okay. And then are you, and so then you have to, you have to, you're using LED lights, then? Is that? No. What are you using? Yeah. So we are using sunlight. How do you sunlight? How do we sunlight? How do you sunlight? Yeah. I mean, my background is as a renewable energy engineer, right? So if you're working in photovoltaics, for example. A lot of time and effort is put into place how to align these photovoltaic panels correctly so that the maximum amount of sun is transformed into kilowatt hours of electricity. Now, we tweak these tools and mechanisms. So we optimize it for this biological process. It basically means breaking up the surface into many, many different tubes, increasing the surface where sunlight can interact with the algae population and therefore optimizing the entire system. And then you make, how do you make the sunlight then? Just put our container so that everything is… Interesting, you put it outdoors. Yeah, yeah. Everything that we do is optimized for the outdoors because sunlight is basically free, right? Electricity is not. Okay, so the microalgae is living in this top container with sunlight that it's… Okay. So you have to add the microalgae for when it's not an obviously like ocean when you have your own… Yeah. Okay, okay. And then, because we're looking at this container, we have the video embedded here that we took earlier. Yeah, so then you add microalgae, then you add… Then you have it sitting in sunlight. And then that's happening in the first chamber is what is the process happening in the first chamber? How does it feed into the second chamber? How does it meet? Yeah, fish. Yeah, true. So I mean if your viewers get the video as well, I think it's easier to imagine. So at the top, which is exposed to sunlight, we grow these microalgae and these tubular structures. And then we feed it to the second unit of the system. And the second unit is basically a large body of water where we keep zoo plankton. Okay. In our case, what you see on the video, it's a species called Daphnia, which basically filter feeds on this algae. And if they have the same population characteristics of algae more or less, right? So if the conditions are right, their population just completely explodes. Something that we basically exploit, right? So we're trying to create the conditions that are ideal for these organisms. Yes. And when they are, the number just increases exponentially. And that's, the exponential increase happens with the microalgae in the first one. Exactly. And then it happens with the zoo plankton in the second one. Okay. And you know, if you have exponential functions in nature, this can't go on forever. So what happens in nature is basically that you have a bloom of algae or an outbreak of zoo plankton and they take up all the resources and then the population just crashes. This is what happens in an algae bloom or if you watch the newspaper frequently, typically in the warm summer months, this happens. Now we use computer vision and machine learning to basically catch these trends, right? So we are able to convert these trends into actual data and feed it into predictive models to tell us when the ideal time for harvesting the zoo plankton actually comes around. And we don't just harvest the zoo plankton, we actually switch on a pump, it basically thumps the deaf near into the fish tank, which is just another large body of water where these fish naturally feed on the zoo plankton. Whoa. Okay. Okay. So got it. Microalgae to zoo plankton and the zoo plankton are fed to the fish. Exactly. So then do you have to start with fish population yourself and then, okay. Yes. So this is what you actually have to introduce, at least every harvest once. So you introduce, let's say, 100 grams of larvae of shrimp, for example, right? Okay. Tiny, tiny things. Okay. But because they are fed and treated, right, their body mass just grows really, really fast, right? So out of 100 grams, 200 grams of larvae, you get 1000 pounds, 2000 pounds of actual fish. No way. 1000, 2000 pounds of shrimp from 100 grams of larvae. Yeah, let's make it 200. 200 grams of larvae, yeah. It's just a very, it's just a very tiny. Damn. That's what's the fascinating thing with life. And that's all you have to do every time is only add the 100 to 200 grams of larvae. But then do you also have to add any of the, but only in the first load you have to add the microalgae and some zoo plankton? Exactly. So what we do as well, I mean, you could keep this system running. This system running indefinitely, basically speaking, right? If you harvest correctly and if you keep up the system up and running, then you're fine. But we have many different algae that we know of, right? And some have evolved to work best at the temperature of, let's say, 60 degrees and others work at temperatures of, let's say, 100 degrees. But what we are proposing is that during the winter time you go for strains of algae that are working best under these winter conditions. And if summer rolls around, you switch out these algae that are adapted to these hotter climates. And the same thing can be done with the zoo plankton, obviously, as well. And to some extent, at least, for the fish or shrimp part as well. Okay. Now, the size right now is pretty large. It's kind of like the size of this closet here. And where do you, yeah, what do you see? Do you see the scooting into shipping containers and being placed in local communities and feeding people that way? Yeah, so, I mean, our next step and the vision actually is to scale this up to 40 foot shipping containers in size. And the modularity of the system allows us to basically scale this up, scale these operations up to football fields in size, feeding cities and even countries if necessary. So it really becomes a question of scale. For ball stadium in size? Oh my gosh. That's mind blowing. I mean, if you watch the ships at Golden Gate Park, you know, just rolling through, or not Golden Gate, Lands End Park. Oh yeah, the big barges with all the shipping containers. Exactly. So they have 18,000 shipping containers on them. And that's our vision to, at one day, load up a ship like this with a farm out of the box with our system. And the cool thing is that we can deploy them anywhere, right? Especially in regions that are currently not usable for anything else, like deserts. And I think the interesting thing is that if this works, and the data shows that it actually does, is that you can take off pressure from either agricultural space, but more importantly from rainforests, for example, that are currently being cleared because we just need to produce the soybeans to defeat a growing population. Okay, so all the way up in size to potentially football teams, shipping containers is the next step. And then also to be able to put it into places that are either really dry, that land is not suitable for harvest, to feed growing populations of people, all those types of things. Picture LA. LA geographically-wise is I think one of the worst locations where you can put a city with how many people? I think like 10 plus million. Exactly, it's basically a desert. Definitely if you cross the mountains you're in the Mojave Desert. So basically most of it has to be shipped in from over 100 miles away, especially when it comes to fish, even despite the fact that it's on the ocean. But you have a lot of land that's actually perfect for our system. You have a lot of land and a lot of sun. And I think this is closing quite a big gap. And so many people want to eat protein. People want to eat seafood. Yeah, they want to eat seafood that has never been exposed to microplastics and pesticides and stuff like this. Oh, this is big. So yeah, I think we are addressing, I don't think a market niche in the beginning. I think going into this, we started this project as engineers and biologists because we like it. But if you go into the field how animal protein is produced, it's getting quite scary also for the fishing side of things. And I think here we can actually, we have to look for alternative sources and we hope that we can be such an alternative source. And then how does it work with, I just have to quickly say on the microplastics and pesticides, oh my gosh, that's a big point because we have a lot of issues with how we're polluting our oceans. And so that's a big one. And so people, as we do that clean up there, we'd like to eat seafood. Now I'm curious on how does the, couple of questions, how do the fish shrimp in this case, let's say, how do they kind of interplay with each other in such a small environment with 1,000 or 2,000 of them? For shrimp it's actually an issue because they are territorial. But it's not the water volume that matters, but the surface they cling on. So even in shipping containers size, if you introduce surfaces, you can do a lot of stuff there. And compared with traditional aquaculture, our densities are way lower. We don't even compare. For salmon farming, for example, you see stocking densities of 120 or 100 kilograms of fish per cubic meter of water. Now a fish, or a harvesting, or a fish that's ready to harvest, to put it like this, weighs about 5 kilograms. So you have picture 20 salmons this big in one cubic meter, it's like the distance between us, right? And you have 20 salmon there. So it's actually quite disgusting. And we have stocking densities that are way, way lower. Okay, this is called stocking densities. Yeah, exactly. It's basically how much fish you put into a given volume. Okay, and you have lower stocking densities and also for sure, you're introducing those, like you said, these barriers. Okay, then for them to cling on. Okay, and then one more thing is that you talked about AI machine learning earlier and I just want to make sure people know. So you're actually using computer vision to make an identifier on every single fish and monitor it? That's the dream. I mean, right now we're tracking behavior of the swarm itself, right? We're able to identify every fish as fish or much rather as the species. We're able to track the behavior. We're able to identify whether a fish is sick or not. Same thing with Daphnia, right? We can track how active are they. We can count their population every 40 seconds or something. So it's actually quite dense net of data that we're collecting. So it's the sensor suite in this dense net of data that gives you insights where you can intervene if things are wrong. Exactly, so that's the reason why we do it. But not because we don't want to be wrong or catch sickness as it happens. We want to turn it into the positive direction, right? So if a population is doing particularly well, we can see what's going on there, right? To replicate it. And then if you have this container farm, right, just basically take this, make a software update on everything else and start production level from this higher stage. And one thing that I wanted to mention as well because he said it before, I mean, I think for us it's important to work with nature and not against it. And these ecosystems are already incredibly efficient. These organisms are incredibly efficient. So if you give them room to grow, right, they will do it anyways. And this is why things like stocking densities and for us is really important to keep it within ethical limitations. Yeah, what you just said there is massive to actually be able to work with nature instead of against it. It's so, so big. And we haven't been doing this for the last 30 years, for sure. We haven't been working with nature for so long. Our species has amnesia from where we come from, from what our source is, and we desperately need to connect back to nature. And this is what we are trying to do. It looks like a super engineered system, and it is. But the engineering serves the purpose to let natural systems run their course, if that makes sense. It's really building something around the core processes. And if a core process is undisturbed and runs well, then it makes economic profit as well. That's sort of the philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cool thinking about the future of having like blue planet ecosystems around the world. And so the more people are able to eat more local to them, there's super closed loop systems with micro-ology, zooplankton, and fish being grown, and sea food being grown. And then just the decreased transit amount, the less we're actually stripping the oceans from, I mean, these are like critical things, the less micro-plastics that are in the fish that we consume. Yeah, all these types of things. I mean, I just want to clarify that we don't want to replace like fisheries and in aquaculture. I mean, just the fact that we need to double the amount of calories that humanity is producing in the next 20, 30 years is a concern. So any technology that's able to produce food somehow is desperately needed. And I don't know if you saw this cool film, Our Planet, or The Planet, and then David Attenborough gave a speech where he said, and actually checked this out afterwards, but our species and our livestock is now 96% of mammal biomass. So all the zebras and lions and giraffes and whatever, that's an elephant, it's like 4%, and the rest is basically us. It's like chickens, pigs, cows. Exactly, and then us humans. And we need to double this somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't really see how we can do this, right? You have all known how Harari talks about it, too. It's one of those big ones. And it can really go both ways. So either we become like a monoculture desert planet and I really say it like this because I think feeding humans is more important than keeping jungles up, to be perfectly honest. But I think the second option is more attractive to have like a garden planet. We have to do a garden planet. We can't feed humans and destroy our ecosystems. That's ridiculous, because then there's no ecosystems to live in afterward. Exactly, and this is my concern as well. I think the second option just makes a lot more sense. And I think California as an example, right? You have, or the United States, you have, I mean, you're being trashed a lot in Europe for environmental stuff. But I think what you realize as the first nation ever, I think, is the importance of national parks and especially you and... Oh yeah, thank goodness for the national parks. And I mean, especially California, it's like it shows how important this is. Oh, we would have destroyed all the areas of national parks. Yeah, exactly. So grateful, yeah. So grateful for that foresight. And it makes economic sense, right? I'm an engineer and economist, so I really try to see both sides. But I think sustainability makes economic sense and also in the short run, I think. I'm so glad that you bring that up because we definitely would have much larger dystopia if we didn't take care of our national parks along the way. And we do need to feed more people on the planet and we do need to do it in a sustainable way. Blue Plain Ecosystem is definitely doing that. And then what's the close on the round that you guys are closing? What are you guys looking for and also what teammates and stuff do you need to get to the shipping container size? Sure, so we are raising 2.8 million right now. We got the first commitments. So fingers crossed that our run is done pretty soon. For us, we want to use the funds to actually build the full scale stacks of the system. And we've got teams in place that are pretty capable of doing this traditional Central European, German, Austrian welding and labour and stuff like this. What we are looking for are actually biologists, data scientists, people that work between the interface of electronics and computer science basically. Cool, cool. Well, I look forward to a future where the kids can look back and say that why didn't we have these things earlier? And we should have been more connected to nature and taking better care of it. I think Blue Plain Ecosystems is a big one. This reminds me a lot of AeroFarms and stuff too. They are in the massive warehouses. This is beautiful to see us moving in this direction. I think all of these companies are addressing the right problem. There are obviously issues with all technologies, also with AeroFarms where electricity is coming from and stuff like this, but at least they are absolutely addressing the right problem. I think many other IndieBio companies are addressing the right problem. Just the fact that you have investors that are saying cell-based meats, you know, seven years of research at least, here you have money, it's a great thing. And this is actually what makes me quite optimistic. Yes, yes. Huge thank you for coming on the show and teaching us all. Thank you very much, huge thank you. You're doing great work. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Also, do check out the links below to Blue Planet Ecosystems. We'll check out the links below to IndieBio. Have more conversations with your friends, your families, coworkers, people online on social media about the sustainable ecosystems and how they can impact the world, teach it to children, spread it around the world. And also support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you believe in. 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