Adam de Sola Pool, a highly successful pioneer in green tech investing in the 1990s, now sees huge opportunities in blue tech. Don’t miss this fascinating tour of ocean technologies conducted by an engaging investor/guide. Read full episode transcript.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Welcomes Back Fellow Angel Investor Adam Pool. Listen to our previous Adam Pool episode.
“...he finds the kind of opportunities [in ocean tech] today that he saw in cleantech back in the 1990s.”
The Surge in Aquaculture Creates Massive Opportunities for Investors, including Angel Investors
Adam Pool Recently Invested in BioFeyn Which Is Making the Feeding of Farmed Fish More Efficient
“...we're transforming the food part of the $3 trillion business that is the ocean economy.”
Sal Sees Parallels Between the Explosion of Opportunities in Biotech and in Blue Tech.
Cool: Seatrec and its Ocean-going Electric Charging Stations
Cool: Making Fish Food Out of Mealworms and Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Cool: Ocean Rainforest Produces Kelp Used to Control Bovine Flatulence
Cool: Reel Data Uses Facial Recognition for Salmon. IKYN!
Interested Angel Investors Can Contact Blue Angels here.
Cool: Oyster Tracker Offers Digital Tracking of Oysters from the Sea Bed to the Dinner Plate
Cool: Fish in Fashion – You Won’t Believe This!
“I'm so glad that I violated my format and went blue instead of bio.”
Many Exits in Blue Tech
Interesting Companies Protecting the Oceans but also Creating Work Opportunities for Displaced Workers
Several VC Funds Being Raised – Investable by Angels
Sal Daher Sees Adam de Sola Pool as a Visionary Who Is Also Practical
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Ocean Tech Rises”
Guest: Adam de Sola Pool
Sal Daher: This podcast is brought to you by Purdue University entrepreneurship, and by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson.
Sal Daher Welcomes Back Fellow Angel Investor Adam Pool
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today we are privileged to have back with us, Adam de Sola Pool. Welcome, Adam.
Adam de Sola Pool: Thank you very much, Sal. It's a real pleasure to be back.
Sal Daher: Adam was on the podcast some years ago and you can look back and get his backstory, so to speak, in an episode called, Johnny Appleseed of Cleantech, because way before anybody else was doing cleantech, Adam was very much involved in doing cleantech of various types. Actually, I can let him summarize a little bit of his cleantech life, which is close to a clean life. Right?
[laughter]
“...he finds the kind of opportunities [in ocean tech] today that he saw in cleantech back in the 1990s.”
Sal Daher: Tell us a little bit about some of your major exploits in the cleantech space. I should complete that thought by saying that Adam is onto a new focus where he finds the kind of opportunities today that he saw in cleantech back in the 1990s. A little bit of a parallel to me, in a sense that I'm seeing opportunities in the biotech space, which harkens back to software in the early 2010s. Anyway, Adam, just give a prissy of your background and what you did in cleantech.
Adam de Sola Pool: Thank you, Sal. I'll be very interested to hear one of these days about how you see the parallels between biotech and tech in the 2010s. My background is that I started one of three, ultimately venture capital funds in central Europe in the 1990s focused on cleantech and we built the first private wastewater treatment company in Hungary, which still exists, Organica Water. It's now in, I think, 25 odd countries, and it's been a great success. I was just there as one of the three guys around the table being the financial one, the two others were the real operating entrepreneurs.
We did the same thing with the first private gas company, gas to the home in Romania. We set up some of the very first solar parks in places like Bulgaria. We also built and developed, and this company still exists operating globally, the largest wind parks in Europe in places like Romania and Serbia. We then diversified to Australia and Continental Wind Partners, the company I helped found with one of three other partners now exists as CWP Renewables and it's operating in Morocco and Australia and all sorts of places around the world. I'm very proud of the early venture investments that I did. It was very much providing operating management and money simultaneously to get these companies off the ground.
Sal Daher: Yes. Actually, listeners can listen to the previous episode, Johnny Appleseed of Cleantech, and all of this is discussed in much greater detail. Also, some thoughts that Adam has about how to make decisions in those kinds of companies. Anyway, Adam, tell me what it is that's drawing you now. Adam is now sitting with a view of Monterey Bay, California because he has switched over to ocean investing. Instead of green investing, blue tech, is that the term?
Adam de Sola Pool: That's right. Blue tech, ocean tech.
Sal Daher: Explain to me what attracts you to blue tech now?
The Surge in Aquaculture Creates Massive Opportunities for Investors, including Angel Investors
Adam de Sola Pool: Well, 70% of the planet is covered by water, 30% is land, and there is a complete lack of modern technology in the oceans these days, and that's changing very rapidly. Things like fisheries, wild-caught fisheries, it's one of the very last things on earth that you and I eat, Sal, that's wild-caught. Chickens, pork, beef, lamb, even the venison is raised on a farm. What we're seeing is a transformation of wild-caught fisheries to aquaculture. Aquaculture that is filled with sensors and automatic feeding and biotech. One of the most interesting investments recently that I made was a company called BioFeyn, which uses the same wrapping technologies that's used in the COVID drugs to get into the system, but applies it to fish feed.
Adam Pool Recently Invested in BioFeyn Which Is Making the Feeding of Farmed Fish More Efficient
The whole food chain in the ocean is transforming from the 19th century, really, to the 21st century. You're also seeing a movement of aquaculture to on land. For example, inland cities like Chicago and Indianapolis now have the equivalent of vertical farms growing salmon. The restauranteurs who used to have to suffer with three to five-day-old fish, suddenly get fish that have been slaughtered in the morning for the table that evening.
Sal Daher: Wow.
“...we're transforming the food part of the $3 trillion business that is the ocean economy.”
Adam de Sola Pool: That's just one example of how we're transforming the food part of the $3 trillion business that is the ocean economy. If you look at ships, ships are still using really old-fashioned technology. Modern energy technologies like hydrogen, ammonia, wind are all starting to play a role in transport. Then you've got energy. The only segment of the ocean economy that's declining is oil and gas drilling and platforms. Those are being replaced by offshore wind and that's growing massively.
For example, for America, they predict that there will be about 450 gigawatts of power ultimately from offshore wind. That's about 450 times as much as the project I built in Romania, but 450 of those projects, that's not out of range in the next 20 years. That's a lot of economy. Whether that is making the boats that go out to the farms, wind farms or the sensors, or the software, there's a whole economy around this. I hope that gives you a sense of why I'm seeing lots of opportunity in this sector.
Sal Daher: Interesting. Listeners should know that Adam is a dreamer, in a sense that he has very lofty ambitions for his investments but he's a very hard-headed investor as well. He wants to make money. If he is seeing opportunity in blue tech, I think it makes sense to wake up and pay attention. I'm right now reconsidering, even though I'm just focusing on life sciences, and wondering if BioFeyn is floating around in my space. I'm just wondering if I'm going to take a closer look at BioFeyn which you've made a recent investment.
Sal Sees Parallels Between the Explosion of Opportunities in Biotech and in Blue Tech.
Anyway, I mentioned to you that I see some parallels in a sense that we are having right now in the life sciences, one of those periodic Cambrian explosions that occurs in various different industries. For various factors, all of a sudden you have a lot of companies coming out. The parallel that I draw is to the early 2010s when all of a sudden software companies became much easier to start. There are a whole bunch of reasons, APIs, the ability to access data on an automated way across platforms, Amazon Web Services, things as mundane as lawyers who do incorporation deferring their fees until a Series A is reached, things of that nature.
All of these innovations shared workspaces. All these innovations contributed to creating this revolution in the software space that we have seen in the last short decade. Since 2011, the person who noticed this was Mark Andreessen back in 2011, why software is eating the world, and software had become a very attractive business to invest in. It was still kind of who poo pooed on Wall Street.
Valuations of software companies were very low despite the fact that some of them were profitable and growing and so on. There was a leftover from the whole business of 2000 and the crash and the bubble and all that stuff. In the last 10 years, we've had software eating the world. Biotech has had some periods of very fast growth, and right now we are having, with the large-scale life science companies, with Moderna, with Pfizer, and other companies. There are amazing things that are happening in the life science space, but that is in the big scale companies.
What I'm seeing is a sort of angel-scale companies exploding. All of a sudden because of factors, very similar to what led to the explosion in a number of software companies in the early 2010s; there are shared lab spaces, the technologies themselves lend themselves to small-scale innovation. In the microfluidic space, in which I'm reasonably active, it doesn't take $100 million to develop something. For me, my focus right now is angel-scale biotech. I have you on because it's not in the focus area, but I'm just curious to find out. I do have the indulgence of being able to explore things that I'm curious about, and I've been curious about what you've been doing since we last had a chat, so I wanted to find out.
I find it interesting that there's a parallel here between these two discoveries. I've pivoted away from software companies, and you have pivoted away from green tech companies, towards blue tech. Let's get concrete here. You've told us about BioFeyn, are some other companies that you want to talk about that you find really particularly appealing?
Cool: Seatrec and its Ocean-going Electric Charging Stations
Adam de Sola Pool: Sure. There's a company called Seatrec, kind of like Star Trek, but for the sea. What it in essence makes his things like an electric vehicle charging station, but for the open ocean. Basically, this floats up and down in the thermocline and uses the thermocline to harvest electricity, or energy, stores it in a battery, and your autonomous underwater vehicle can nuzzle up to the charging station that's floating in the ocean about 20 meters deep and get itself recharged.
Sal Daher: It's converting mechanical energy to electrical energy?
Adam de Sola Pool: It's converting thermal.
Sal Daher: Oh, thermal, thermal energy. Okay.
Adam de Sola Pool: The thermocline. It's warmer and closer to the surface and colder down below. It floats up and down and a phase change material expands and contracts. The reason I invested in this was because, like GPS, this was a US military technology for recharging their silent submarines. The military gave them permission to commercialize. What they're doing, in essence, is putting out, similar to Tesla charging stations. They're putting out a series of charging stations all around the world that your scientific vehicle or your sensor vehicle, your autonomous underwater vehicle, can go up to and get recharged.
Sal Daher: [laughs] This is amazing. Floating electrical recharging stations in the ocean.
Adam de Sola Pool: Exactly. Isn't that amazing?
Sal Daher: It is. Who and how do they connect? Do they actually plug-in? Do they recharge by induction?
Adam de Sola Pool: Frankly, I'm not sure, but basically, I think it is induction. It is like the wireless- because all you have to do is nuzzle up to it. There is not a specific port that connects A to B.
Sal Daher: The way that they make money is that there are services that need recharging out there in the wild?
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes.
Sal Daher: Do you know how many of these recharging stations they have floating and where?
Adam de Sola Pool: No, I don't know exactly how many they have. It's in the hundreds. I'm sure it's in the busy parts of the world versus the non-busy parts of the world, just like finding a Tesla charging station in Manitoba may be more difficult than in California. They're growing all the time, Seatrec is. Basically, they are currently following these areas of scientific endeavor because most of the autonomous underwater vehicles are military or science-driven, but more and more companies are needing this service too. It's all interlinked which is interesting because every wind farm that goes and built offshore needs to have monitoring for cetaceans, whales.
Basically, they have to stop construction during the time the whale is passing through. Well, the underwater monitoring station that is listening for the whale call is battery-powered, and so it has to be on duty 24/7. Therefore, you basically have two of them sitting there and one goes off duty to get charged, and the other one is on duty and comes back in. That's where you will find all of these Seatrec charging stations.
Sal Daher: This is for the transcription. Seatrec, S-E-A, T as in Tom, R-E, C as in Charlie?
Adam de Sola Pool: It's based near San Diego. Yi Chao is the CEO. He comes out of the California marine and military world.
Sal Daher: This is very cool. Seatrec.com. How many rounds have they raised? Where are they in terms of their funding?
Cool: Making Fish Food Out of Mealworms and Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Adam de Sola Pool: Well, the round I invested in which was in 2021 was a Series A. This world is still small, as we were talking about earlier. The largest single investment in an ocean tech company has been in Ynsect, Y-N-S-E-C-T. They have the distinction of having raised the largest round yet for a ocean tech company. They make mealworms for fish feed. You will be surprised to know that the size of that round was 139 million.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Adam de Sola Pool: There's less than $1 billion a year that's going into ocean tech from financial investors these days. It's just like it was in the 1990s for me for cleantech. There's a company out of Indonesia that does fish feeding machines and sensing. They just raised the largest Series C round to date at 90 million.
Sal Daher: This is very basic infrastructure.
Adam de Sola Pool: That's right.
Sal Daher: Yes, that's going in. If you're going to be building fish farms, you're going to have seafood, you're going to need fish food, so it's like picks and shovels for that. It's very, very close to the ground. No wonder. 100 million. Oh, my gosh. It's very interesting, very interesting. They're actually insects that they're growing or harvesting?
Adam de Sola Pool: No, they're growing mealworms and black soldier flies. They're feeding these based on waste food from food processing facilities, so they often collocate. They grow these worms, then they cook them, grind them up, and package them into fish food.
Sal Daher: Fantastic.
Cool: Ocean Rainforest Produces Kelp Used to Control Bovine Flatulence
Adam de Sola Pool: That's because there has been a lot of pushback from fishing the oceans to feed the salmon that are in the fish farms. These smallish investments that as you correctly say, are the picks and shovels that are absolutely needed to facilitate feeding the world or powering the world. Those are the sorts of investments I've been making. There's another one that I'm really excited about, which is kelp farming. Kelp farming can happen either through the company Ocean Rainforest, in the Faroe Islands, or Blue in Namibia.
Ocean Rainforest has developed an efficient technology and basically has a franchising-like model, so that local fishermen in various different locations all over the world can get an Ocean Rainforest license and supply Ocean Rainforest with kelp. That kelp is then dried and put into animal feed and it causes something more than 60% reduction in methane emissions from cows because it goes into the cow feed. As you know, cows burp a lot of methane. This addition of the kelp stops that.
Sal Daher: Adam, do you know if there's any data if adding kelp to the diet of younger brothers reduces methane emission?
[laughter]
Adam de Sola Pool: It absolutely does. Kelp has been shown to have a very probiotic effect to make your digestive system work better, as it does with cows.
Sal Daher: This is the kind of stuff you learn if your younger brother is smelling up the place, feed him kelp.
Adam de Sola Pool: Feed him kelp. Correct. There's a wonderful kelp company coming out of Maine, Atlantic Sea Farms, which you may know.
Sal Daher: The one in Africa, what is it called?
Adam de Sola Pool: Blue, B-L-U-E. It's a Dutch company that is making industrial-scale kelp farms off of basically, empty coastlines like Namibia. Ocean Rainforest has a very different strategy which is to have many smaller farms using artisanal fishermen.
Sal Daher: Really interesting. The variety of products and also the business model is fascinating. How much money have they raised? Do you know?
Adam de Sola Pool: Blue is in the process of raising quite a large amount of money from pension funds because it's claiming to be a private equity play because it's more just a big industrial facility. I know that Ocean Rainforest has just raised €13 million from Dutch and European investors. They'll have another round coming up soon and I'm going to definitely participate in that one.
Sal Daher: Good. If a listener is interested in this, could they reach out to you? Is that a possibility or are you just doing your own portfolio?
Adam de Sola Pool: Oh no, absolutely. They're welcome to reach out to me. I've helped to form a new Boston angel group which you may or may not know about called the Blue Angels.
Sal Daher: Yes, I heard about this. Tell us about Blue Angels.
Adam de Sola Pool: Well, it's about 40 of us who have an interest in ocean technologies, about a third are interested in shipping technologies. That's propulsion technologies, clean propulsion, clean water, wastewater on ships, efficiency of routing ships, those sorts of things. About a third are interested in aquaculture, whether that be an oyster farm or tracking your seafood from the boat all the way to the table to make sure that it's been maintained at proper temperature and freshness.
Cool: Reel Data Uses Facial Recognition for Salmon. IKYN!
Or whether it's like these kelp farms like Ocean Rainforest, and then there's another third that are interested in the software and data. For example, there's an interesting Canadian company called Reel, R-E-E-L Data which basically uses facial recognition technology to recognize the various salmon in your pen.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Facial recognition for salmon. My gosh, I thought they all looked alike.
Adam de Sola Pool: [laughs] You would think so but when you look at enough salmon for when you have a big enough data set to train on, you can begin to spot differences.
Sal Daher: This is mind-expanding. I never thought of this, the possibilities of kelp, face recognition for salmon? This is so cool.
Adam de Sola Pool: It is. It is really cool which is why I'm so interested in it. Reel Data basically allows you to track the weight gain of your various salmon. If a salmon isn't gaining weight, it's probably sick or stressed in some way, and you want to pull it out of the pen and give it proper individualized care so it doesn't hurt or pollute the other salmon in there. That's why camera technologies in pens is very important. You also use the camera technology to know exactly how much food to give the fish because fish food is the number one cost in raising salmon or other items or other fish.
You use the cameras to see when the pellets that you're dropping in are no longer getting eaten. When a pellet gets to the bottom of the cage, you know that the fish are feeling full enough that they're not diving to eat and so then you shut off the system.
Sal Daher: It’s called Reel?
Adam de Sola Pool: Reel, R-E-E-L, just like fishing reel, Data.
Sal Daher: Adam, would you please tell us again the name of your Blue Angel investing group in Boston?
Adam de Sola Pool: Sure. It's called the Blue Angels and it's part of the SeaAhead. S-E-A Ahead Group.
Sal Daher: Is there a website?
Interested Angel Investors Can Contact Blue Angels at
https://sea-ahead.com/blue-angels
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes. https://sea-ahead.com/blue-angels
Sal Daher: No conflict with the Blue Angels air acrobatic team?
Adam de Sola Pool: No, we do ocean acrobatics. [laughs]
Cool: Oyster Tracker Offers Digital Tracking of Oysters from the Sea Bed to the Dinner Plate
Sal Daher: Oyster Tracker, what do they do? Is that one of the companies are invested in?
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes, it is. It's a lovely company. Chip Terry runs it and what they do is track your oyster all the way from pulling it out of the pen to serving it on the plate. This digital tracking replaces the paper slips that historically, the whole chain had to use because if you get sick from an oyster--
Sal Daher: Oh, like a chain of custody? This is like you have to preserve the chain of custody?
Adam de Sola Pool: Exactly. Because oysters are live fish, live bivalves, when you eat them, some people do get sick and you have to trace it back to which cove was polluted. Therefore, this does it electronically and preserves it digitally versus actually having to trace a paper trail.
Sal Daher: Phenomenal. This is a lot like the company Squadle in which I'm an investor which is the back office of fast-food restaurants.
Adam de Sola Pool: Absolutely. I'm a Squadle investor too.
Sal Daher: [chuckles] Really fascinating that you really are a pioneer again, the Johnny Appleseed of BlueTech.
Adam de Sola Pool: Johnny Tuna.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Johnny Tuna, yes. Any other companies that occurred to you that our listeners might find interesting?
Adam de Sola Pool: Well, I'm looking very closely these days at a fashion company.
Cool: Fish in Fashion – You Won’t Believe This!
Sal Daher: Fashion?
Adam de Sola Pool: Fashion. I think you'll find this quite interesting.
Sal Daher: [chuckles] Yes, I'm ready.
Adam de Sola Pool: They hire local fishermen all over the world to catch invasive fish species, particularly lionfish which are an aquarium fish that have escaped out into warm waters all over the world and are invasive, and they're nasty fish. If you catch a lionfish, this company will pay you $1 a hide or $1 a fish.
Sal Daher: Oh wow.
Adam de Sola Pool: They convert the lionfish skins into leather which is used by very famous fashion designers, whose names I can't reveal, for leather boots, watch straps, all sorts of designer fashion based on eradicating an invasive species.
Sal Daher: Wow, this is fascinating. Boy, I'm looking at pictures of it. Ugly.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Fancy ugly. I imagine, so fish hide. What stage is that company now?
Adam de Sola Pool: They have their first sales to an Italian designer and they're seeking money right now to expand, and diversify and build up sourcing operations from all over the world. Currently, they're just in the Caribbean
Sal Daher: This is really fascinating. The beauty of it is that you are eradicating an invasive species and at the same time providing employment, providing sustenance to people who need the work.
Adam de Sola Pool: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Allowing them to continue doing stuff that is congenial to how they've grown up and the things that they like to do, being in the water and so on but they can make money at it. This is really, really cool. This is a little bit like the Airbnb of eradicating invasive species. Are they going to move on to other species?
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes. Their business plan shows them moving on to other types of non-native species. Each type of skin of the fish has this particular grain you might say. One might look like alligator leather and one might look like some other type that is currently used but is unsustainable in the long run.
Sal Daher: That is fantastic. By the way, it is a venomous fish, a poisonous fish. It's very, very good that you're going after these characters. Fascinating.
Adam de Sola Pool: The kelp farm also is a part-time occupation for most of these fishermen because you grow kelp, you seed it on lines in the wintertime, and then you let it grow all winter when the storms are rough in the northern hemisphere. Then you harvest it in the spring when the fishermen can go back out into the ocean.
Sal Daher: This is tremendous. A lot of these fishermen as we do away with wild-caught fishing, there's going to be less work for them, but there'll be more work for them to do of type.
Adam de Sola Pool: Exactly.
“I'm so glad that I violated my format and went blue instead of bio.”
Sal Daher: I'm so glad that I violated my format and went blue instead of bio. Have there been any exits in the space?
Many Exits in Blue Tech
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes, there have been several exits among robotics companies. Unfortunately, I was not an investor in them. We are blessed by actually having a relatively easy exit world because the large companies like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, have been buying up the underwater hardware companies because they have a military sales base that they can use this for. Once you actually prove out that you're underwater, autonomous vehicle works, or your surface vehicle, companies like Saildrone were sold to Boeing, Bluefin Robotics, I think, was bought by Lockheed.
They have been snatching up at the Series B, Series C type round these companies. Then on the agriculture side, we have relatively easy access to large feed companies, so the Cargills of the world, the new Nutrecos of the world have been buying up any of the new advances that get proven in the feed space. We also are blessed by some really smart family offices in this area. The Walton family has at least two different investing vehicles focused on this because Walmart is the biggest seller of fish in the United States, and they clearly recognize how important having a good supply chain is to their business.
Several of the Walton family members have set up investment vehicles that are going and building companies from the very beginning. Those are people who obviously have good connections into selling these investments into the large industrial world.
Interesting Companies Protecting the Oceans but also Creating Work Opportunities for Displaced Workers
Sal Daher: Wow, this is really eye-opening. Very interesting companies that are doing worthwhile things, which include maintaining workers, providing sustenance for workers, and then there are exits too, and eradicating noxious, invasive species. This is beautiful, this is really beautiful.
Adam de Sola Pool: It is. It's really interesting that it mirrors all the things that are in the terrestrial economy in the ocean. It's not like I'm limiting myself to any one particular economic segment. I have logistics, I have food, I've got data, I've got all the things that have happened in the 20th and 21st century on land, are now being transported into the ocean, and that's where we're getting this just giant uptick in interest and in valuation, and in exits.
Sal Daher: I can see that perhaps you have a lot of models. You understand how these things worked out on land, and how they might work out in the sea because as I say, the stuff is pretty basic stuff. It means that there's gold coins to be picked up on the sidewalk, or I should say, in the shallow waters which is much tougher when you have a much more highly developed market.
Adam de Sola Pool: That's right. You got it.
Sal Daher: This is just amazing. Well, this is the kind of stuff that you would expect from Adam Pool, coming up with a completely unexpected direction for going on things. I'm very pleased to be hearing of these adventures. Are there any other thoughts that you want to leave the audience with?
Adam de Sola Pool: One of the very interesting areas is that in the last six to eight months, we have seen the emergence of the first venture capital funds focused exclusively on the ocean. You are getting in at the very, very early stage here of the whole industry.
Several VC Funds Being Raised – Investable by Angels
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is setting up a fund, SeaAhead is setting up a fund, Katapult Ocean is setting up a fund. Historically, there were these family offices I just talked about that were active, but they weren't open to individuals or LPs to invest in. I would say that it really is a 2021 phenomenon. Other than the granddaddy, the old man of the world in this ocean tech investing is a company called Aqua-Spark out of the Netherlands founded by Mike Velings and Amy Novogratz in 2013. That was the very first pooled capital investments, and they've made some amazing investments. They have been very successful.
It's an interesting model, Sal, because once a quarter they publish a price, and you can enter and acquire more units, or sell units at that price. It's a perpetual fund. It does not have a end date. Aqua-Spark is the old man of the business and that's 2013. What we've seen in 2021, eight years later, is a sudden proliferation of new funds and I expect more will come because most of the funds that were set up around now are in the $100 million range. You know, venture capital funds in other sectors are in the billion-dollar range.
Sal Daher: Oh, $100 million is a tiny fund. Now, what are the valuations like for a Series A company?
Adam de Sola Pool: Valuations are still modest by comparison to my cleantech sector, clean energy sector. For a seed round, we're still seeing between $3 million and $7 million as a normal valuation. For a Series A, it's between 7 million and 12 million, let's say.
Sal Daher: Oh, yes, pretty modest.
Adam de Sola Pool: Yes.
Sal Daher: Sounds very appealing.
Adam de Sola Pool: It's very appealing, it's very much a space where individuals like you and I can still make an impact with our brains and our money. It's like Central Europe was when I moved there in the 1990s, a wide-open playing field that allowed you to do what you wanted to do, and make money and make great companies.
Sal Daher: Pattern recognition is at work here.
Adam de Sola Pool: Correct.
Sal Daher: Adam, would it be too much of a wiseguy move to say that come on in the water's fine?
Adam de Sola Pool: [laughs] I think that is great. I do think there are probably a few sharks out there, but if you know where to go swimming, you will enjoy the time.
Sal Daher: Well, I invite guests who are interested in this to check out Blue Angels at SeaAhead, so sea-ahead.com/blue-angels. Check out some of these very smart guys who are doing this amazing stuff, which is just-- I'm amazed. I'm still amazed with this discovery of kelp. Oh, my gosh, you could have a significant impact on human relations.
Adam de Sola Pool: Especially with your younger brother.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: I didn't say my younger brother. I asked if it works on younger brothers. It might be someone else's younger brother. I don't want to malign my younger brother too much. He's a big guy. Younger brothers. Let's keep this clear here.
[background music]
Adam de Sola Pool: That's true.
Sal Daher: All right.
Adam de Sola Pool: You are correct.
Sal Daher: Okay, very good. Adam, is there any other thoughts?
Adam de Sola Pool: No. Thank you very much, Sal. You and anyone listening today is welcome to come for a completely complimentary session to the Blue Angels, so long as you're an accredited investor and see what we're doing.
Sal Daher Sees Adam de Sola Pool as a Visionary Who Is Also Practical
Sal Daher: This is tremendous. I highly recommend Adam, as someone who is a visionary, but a very practical visionary. Somebody who has pattern recognition. He's seen this attractive environment before. Adam Pool, I thank you for taking the time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Adam de Sola Pool: Thank you very much, Sal. It's a pleasure to be back.
Sal Daher: Excellent. This is Angel Invest Boston, I'm Sal Daher. I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.