After speaking to Dawn Kernagis, Kirk Krack, Rick Goddard and Harry Thompson, and Mike Shackleford as part of our DEEP interview series, we chat to Sean Wolpert, President at DEEP, about the importance of investing in the blue economy.

Oceanographic: Sean, how do you see the future of ocean conservation and DEEP’s involvement in that sector?

Sean Wolpert: “The first challenge is the awareness and the understanding of the ocean. Unlike most other areas of the planets and space, it’s very difficult to see beneath the surface of the ocean. We can all look up and gaze at the stars and use our imagination. We don’t have the same luxury with the ocean in a meaningful way. When we have had the discussion about what we’re trying to achieve going beneath the surface of the ocean, you often just get asked ‘why’ because that realm is so out of sight and out of mind for most people. When you have that type of mentality, you are pushing a boulder uphill in terms of trying to shift people’s perspectives to pivot their awareness to the ocean and understand its importance. What we’re trying to do at DEEP is to start to change that perspective. We want to change the level of engagement by providing a platform and by revolutionizing the way people access and interact with the ocean. We want to be that platform that provides capacity and scope for people to ultimately increase their awareness and the amount of data that they’re able to capture to increase our knowledge. Only then, can you start to tackle the concept of conservation.”

Oceanographic: How do you envision the future of investing in the ocean environment? Where do the challenges lie?  

Sean Wolpert: “Many tend to focus on the end results such as sustainable fisheries, aquaculture, marine biotechnology, renewable energy, and so on, right? These things have been present in terms of areas where most want to invest in for a very long time, yet the industry is still struggling to attract capital to these areas. What is the binding constraint from these opening up in a meaningful way? I am not a scientist or an engineer. I was a hedge fund manager before working at DEEP, so I understand how capital flows operate. When you go through that investment process, and you’re trying to take private capital and push it forward, the first thing you need is an immense amount of data because through that, people will assess those different opportunities. When you look at financial markets, whether you invest in a stock or in a bond, you have that transparency down to the fundamental data to help inform that decision. That’s the first layer.

The second layer is the measurement of your investment outcomes, and this is where you start to see a lot of the challenges emerge where better data would help to inform better capital allocation decisions. I’ll dive into why that’s important. If I go in and I invest in a certain company or industry, I need to be able to assess the success or failure of what I set out to achieve in terms of my objectives, what I’m trying to optimise for, and then be able to refine my approach in an informed way because this isn’t philanthropic money where I part ways with it, and then that’s it. This is something that needs to be managed to achieve an outcome. In the ocean space, it is much more incomplete and insufficient when you compare it to other areas that pools of capital are deployed from. We need a unifying framework. And this is where you’re seeing a lot of the challenges in terms of the private sector.

When you look at the ESG (environmental, social, governance) ambitions, you’re starting to see a big pushback. What’s the standard in terms of trying to judge if someone is making an effective investment to have proper impacts within the ocean underneath these frameworks? It’s the data and the framework. The inability to have high quality data and a standardised framework that is agreed across the board has been a massive headwind for meaningful size capital to come into that space.

And lastly, it’s not just the investment capital, it’s also the policy making. You’ve seen this through the International Seabed Authority with the UN in terms of deep-sea mining, for example, where they were unable to come to some sort of agreement because there’s no clear and transparent way to measure impact that could be agreed across the board. So, when you don’t have good quality data to help inform decision making, you just have ideologies influencing policy, and that’s just politics. By providing that platform for better data capture, we’re able to produce and help other partners within the marine industry create better data to ultimately make better policy. And that’s where the challenge is set.”

Oceanographic: What could bring these together and help foster a meaningful ocean economy?

Sean Wolpert: “There’s a spectrum of capital in terms of how people might look at an opportunity. On one side, you have the kind of people that want profits. On the other side, you have philanthropy where you part ways with your money. You pick a particular area where you want to have an impact and you invest your money there. Certainly, what you see in the marine sector now is that those two elements – profit and good – are not necessarily different. They’re often presented as one or the other, but you can see them being self-reinforcing in a meaningful way. It’s about having pools of capital and incentivizing those pools of capital. There might be a profit element but it’s also about the return on purpose and trying to solve the agency problem which happens when your capital doesn’t necessarily get allocated, invested, and deployed in the way that it was originally intended. In the ocean economy, the deployed capital can have that meaningful impact to a broader set of stakeholders in terms of how it influences the climate, how it influences the carbon cycle, how it influences coastal communities and so forth. Yet it’s something that can drive a rate of return.”

Oceanographic: How do you see the financial future of DEEP? Will there be investment options for individuals?

Sean Wolpert: “We are not doing DEEP for our generation. DEEP is being built and grown, and it’s evolving and innovating for future generations. We’re looking for investors and partners that have a very similar mindset. They have a similar spirit in terms of the importance of the ocean and the opportunity in the ocean in a way where it helps provide that platform to foster greater degrees of outreach, awareness and understanding of the ocean. If you think about it as a fully connected ecosystem, you have that like-minded approach. We don’t think in two years, three years, or five years, we’re thinking in decades, if not generations. Those are the types of investors we’re looking to partner with through the long term.

We’re now taking that big leap of something that was very hard and difficult to achieve. We pushed that forward and effectively de-risked a lot of that venture for future investors. We’ve come to this point now where, if we really want to see the acceleration and growth of our technology and of our platform within the oceans, we are very keen to look for partners, but ones that have that generational mindset and those that are looking to make that type of impact as well within that ecosystem.”

Oceanographic: What’s your vision for the future of DEEP? Where do you see the company in 10, maybe 100 years?

Sean Wolpert: “I see DEEP as a NASA for the oceans. NASA was not about a rocket. NASA was about a mission to make our species multi-planetary. To do that, they built a platform of research, of innovation, of assets that ultimately allowed them to continue to evolve that organization to execute on that mission. That’s what we’re trying to do with DEEP, so DEEP is effectively about that platform that’s allowing us to execute our vision of bringing humans into the ocean in a responsible and sustainable way. It’s about bringing those eyeballs down there and it’s about providing that greater degree of outreach to the broader population. If you think about how we want to operate moving forward, it’s becoming much more efficient in terms of how we consolidate that scientific chain into that singular subsea campus, producing those labs in the ocean. What that does is it greatly enhances the abundance of work and research we can conduct down there. It will greatly increase the quality and the positive yield of research that occurs down there.”

Oceanographic: And what exactly are you trying to find out down there?

Sean Wolpert: “What that means is that we’re going to have a greater understanding of how the carbon cycle is influenced by the ocean. The ocean is the heart and lungs of the planet. By being down there, by getting the scientists down there, they’ll be able to be much more productive at depth. By putting a permanent presence down, much like the space station did for space research, it will drive eyeballs and research funding to the ocean. We also want to look at biodiversity aspects and people’s health and lifespans. A lifespan tells us how long you can live, while a health span is about the quality of life as long as I’m alive which is an increasingly important part. When you look at different evolutions within the ocean, for example at sea sponges and other plants and animals, they’re swimming in a sea of bacteria and fungi, but through natural chemical processes, they are very effectively learning which ones they want to repel and absorb to ensure their continuity. That has so many applications in terms of our own healthcare. But one of the big challenges is our ability to go and access and study that in situ. Our platform allows that to happen. What we’re trying to do is provide that access that then has that multitude of impacts across industries back up on land, including the renewable energy sector or the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, for example.”

Oceanographic: What do you see as the main challenges when it comes to creating a blue economy or an investment system in the future that benefits everyone?

Sean Wolpert: “I think it’s the mobilisation of capital. I’ve seen statistics that state that there is a $2 trillion financing gap for small to medium-sized enterprises that are looking to do business in the ocean. That’s not because there isn’t $2 trillion in the world. There are a lot of savings in the world. So, it’s about trying to tackle those funding constraints. Why do they exist? Does it have something to do with the incentive structure? Is it something that could be influenced by governments or other federal agencies, much like they’ve been trying to do with the green economy? One way to do that is to make the process very intuitive and transparent with the help of better-quality data. That is one area that is going to be extremely important.

Then, when you start to get these foundational investments and assets that provide access to the sea, you begin to have a greater degree of outreach. You can start to inspire a generation going through university by outlining these different opportunities within the ocean economy that begin to galvanize. It’s currently easier for someone going through university to get funding as an astrophysicist for an experiment in the International Space Station. It’s much cheaper than going to the ocean. For a marine biologist, on the other hand, there is not an abundance of ships out there to do research. There are only 40 or 50 submersibles in the world and the US only has a fraction of that out there doing research. So, research ideas are going to take a long time, and right off the bat, as a marine biologist, you are disincentivized to continue down that path.

We need to highlight that there is this wonderful opportunity to make an impact, and that there is money that is being unblocked from these binding constraints we were talking about. We need to inspire that generation in the universities and younger and show them that this is a wonderful area of underexplored potential with impact for a broader set of stakeholders around the world. That’s going to be the key thing. We need to provide the platform, to allow a lot of this capital to come into the sea and provide that physical infrastructure, whether it’s manned or unmanned, to go into the ocean. Then, you do that from the grassroots level onwards.”