S(hr)imply Brilliant: Our investment in Tidal Vision
Headquartered deep in Washington State, Craig Kasberg, Zach Wilkinson and their team are harnessing the power of one of Mother Nature’s best kept secrets.
Tidal Vision is building a biomaterials platform to solve humanity’s greatest chemistry and pollution challenges. They are doing so with a magical product called chitosan. Chitosan is derived from chitin, the second most abundant polysaccharide (long-chain carbohydrate molecules) in nature after cellulose. Chitin is the main ingredient in natural structures like crustacean shells, insect exoskeletons, fungi cell walls, and even the beaks of giant squid!
Will Dufton and some of the Tidal Vision team
Chitosan is magical because of the breadth of its material properties. It can help decontaminate water, reduce the need for fertilisers, and be repurposed as an antimicrobial barrier in food packaging. The same trait that allows shellfish to regenerate their shells also has valuable applications in medicine to treat wounds. And when chitosan is burned, it chars, meaning it has naturally fire-retardant properties. And those are just a handful of its capabilities.
The problem is that manufacturing chitosan has historically been expensive, dirty, and imprecise. This is where Tidal Vision comes in.
Craig and Zach have been working on this waste problem since 2015, but it was written in the stars many years before. Craig grew up in “a town without a road” in deep Alaska, surrounded by the fishing industry. He built two fishing enterprises and saw firsthand the amount of waste created by the sector. After meeting Zach Wilkinson in 2015, they teamed up to combat this waste. Their first attempt at solving this problem was upcycling salmon skin into faux-leather goods. Then they honed in on the global opportunity for chitosan and started making it in a barrel and using a domestic clothes dryer they bought off Craigslist. Things have scaled up a lot since then!
Cue: Chitofining, an economical, zero-waste, and highly customisable process to make chitosan at industrial scale from crustacean shells that would otherwise be dumped in landfills or the sea. Tidal Vision is now producing tons of chitosan every day.
The special properties of chitosan depend on two variables: molecular weight and deacetylation. Tidal Vision can isolate these variables and replicate them at scale. This capability is unique, as is Zale Technology, Tidal Vision’s proprietary process to increase concentrations by 500%+ and decrease viscosity by 98%. Not only has Tidal Vision cracked chitosan manufacturing at industrial scale, but these breakthroughs have made it industrially useful.
Rather than sell chitosan as an ingredient, they use it as an input for game-changing downstream products.
Visiting their R&D facility in Bellingham is like entering an alchemist’s lair; their team of scientists, led by the fantastic Dr Ramesh Raliya, is cooking up all sorts of chitosan-based applications. Tidal Vision has three main product lines driving revenue today.
Tidal Clear has developed several products for the water treatment industry that act as coagulants and flocculants, binding the gunk in pre-treated water and separating it for easy disposal, helping to clean the water. It is a biodegradable alternative to the synthetic, metal-based chemicals used today, and it is more effective, lowering the total content of sludge. This means less volume for landfills; some customers need 6x fewer truckloads per year, significantly reducing carbon emissions.
Tidal Grow is the agricultural division that sells a range of products that support nitrogen uptake, reducing the need for synthetic fertilisers (resulting in fewer emissions). These products take advantage of chitosan’s ability to trigger receptors in the cell walls of plants to increase farmers’ yields and profits.
And Tidal-Tec is where precision chitosan meets the greater material science world. Material science uses the valuable properties of chitosan to improve the performance in fire retardants, antimicrobials, nanoencapsulation, and more.
Tidal Vision has been doing a great job of scaling its existing portfolio of products while developing new ones. The growth story has been remarkable: the company is forecast to double revenue this year, reaching almost nine-figures. It is a paragon of purpose-driven technology, where every dollar of revenue has an additional positive impact.
We are delighted to announce that we have participated in Tidal Vision’s recent $140 million Series B. We believe the team at Tidal Vision is building the ultimate circular economy company: they valorise hazardous seafood waste, create high-value products with every output of their Chitofining process, and create products that help their customers generate more revenue, save costs, and have a positive impact on the environment all at once.
We are thrilled to be part of the journey.