The future of seafood is on land. And now it needs a lab.
24 July 2026
In late 2024 I sat down to work out what the world would eat in 2050, and whether SHRMP.bio was a silly idea.
The work is all online — four scenarios, the population maths, the trade picture, the technology trends. Around seven billion people in cities by mid-century, a lot of them old. Arable land moving north and south, out from under the people currently farming it. Enough food on paper, in the wrong places once trade tightens. And the nutrients that only seafood carries in short supply exactly where the people are. The full picture is in the archive.
The good news that came out of it: really not a silly idea at all. Land-based, recirculating aquaculture — seafood grown indoors, the water cleaned and reused instead of drawn from the sea — is one of the most overlooked technologies available today. So I built a startup around it. We found a lab and student teams at the University of Melbourne, and built the beginnings of a prototype — one with real, live prawns in it, because the first ever team of SHRMP students made that a condition: we are not doing it without a prawn in the tank, that would be boring.
Here is where it got interesting.
Growing a shrimp from juvenile to adult is not the hard part. That is done at scale already; an open pond is the low-tech end of the same thing. The hard part is the biology and the system design — the slow business of making a species reliably farmable in a fully controlled environment, batch after batch, harvest after harvest, without nature doing most of the work for you. That part is years long. A startup is a machine for raising money against a clock. Point it at a problem measured in harvest seasons, and everyone with investment dollars in their pockets runs.
Plenty of hard-science companies carry years of R&D on a runway — that is what deep-tech companies do and what deep-tech venture money is for, and that is part of what makes this exciting. What I concluded, though, is that it is very hard to start as a small team of outsiders, in an ocean already sparsely populated with aquaculture-technology people — and more sparsely still with industry, and more sparsely again with innovation funding — on a bootstrapped budget.
The ideas, the concepts and the science of SHRMP.bio need a facility and a decade before they are ready — and I suspect that is also the decade the market needs to be ready for them. I never tried to dress that up as an investable eighteen-month plan, because that would have been the really silly idea. It led to some frustrations along the way.
Which only encouraged me to try harder.
Going into 2026, Elizabeth and I decided to change tack and focus on what SHRMP.bio really is. Research. Or as Elizabeth put it: putting the BIO back in SHRMP.bio.
The ideas, the accumulated work, the analysis, the prototype, and the IP behind them are really cool — and the need for them is real. But they are worth far more in a place built for the job. Automated, decentralised, modular land-based prawn production; fully autonomous recirculating system design; the breeding frontier: for the right group, any one of those is worth carrying further, on the timescale the science and the technology actually need.
The future of seafood is on land. And SHRMP.bio could use a home to be reared in:
If that is your field — aquaculture, food security, industrial bioprocessing — we should have a chat: shrmp.bio.