Sea6 Energy: Can this Deep-tech Start-up Scale-up Operations and Make it Big?
Case Code: LDEN222 Case Length: 11 Pages Period: 2010-2022 Pub Date: 2024 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.400 Organization : - Industry :Energy Countries : India Themes: Entrepreneurial Strategy, Social Entrepreneurship, Product Strategy & Design,Innovation |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
Excerpts
Inception of Sea6
The cofounding team of Sea6 along with Suryanarayan, who was visiting professor, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras, were Sowmya Lakshmi Balendiran (Balendiran) and Sri Salina Nori (Nori), students of the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras; and Sayash Kumar (Sayash) B.Tech and M.Tech (dual degree) biotechnology from IIT Madras, and Nelson Vadassery (Nelson) B.Tech in biotechnology from Sri Venketeswara College of Engineering with a management degree from IIM Calcutta. The student team came together in 2008 over a cup of coffee and set out to invent a scalable solution for India in the area of renewable energy since the country was importing about 80% of its liquid fuel needs..
Initial Challenges
The team founded Sea6 in July 2010 and raised INR 0.08 billion from some investors including Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Shaw) and Suryanarayan, who became the chairman of the start-up. Since the company was based within the campus of IIT-Madras, laboratory and office space were made available thanks to the supportive faculty of the Department of Biotechnology. This foundational help was very crucial for Sea6 in its early years. The presence of engineering students also helped the company attract a lot of diverse talent from within the campus..
Shifting Focus From Biofuels to Biostimulants
Sea6 team decided to develop organic, natural, and high-quality agri-inputs that helped plants to inherently produce hormones that enhanced quality and yield. The objective was to reduce the over-usage of chemical agri-inputs by farmers across India. By 2018, the team produced a biostimulant named AgroGain, a chemical-free product made from seaweed extracts that enhanced agriculture production up to 15%..
Developing Seaweed Farming Systems
Seaweed was typically grown in shallow waters because the plant slowly sank to the bottom. When the company started looking at seaweed cultivation, it decided to develop a platform to anchor the plant in deeper waters. Such a platform had to withstand powerful waves and therefore had to be strong. Engineers at Sea6 developed a structure named SeaCombine that was flexible as well as strong, which was able to withstand the forces at sea by distributing them all around the structure, just the way a cat was able to bear the shock of a landing by distributing the force all over its body..
Market Development and Commercialization
Sea6 Energy had already discovered and patented several unique molecules from cultivated red seaweeds that could specifically bring about growth in plants and these compositions were the subject of the patents granted to them..
Can sea6 scale up and become profitable?
Biostimulants were an exciting new class of agricultural inputs that could improve the efficiency of nutrient usage and relieve abiotic and other stresses in plants induced by climate change. India had taken the lead in this field and had been one of the earliest countries in the world to formalize the regulations governing biostimulant use in agriculture..
Road Ahead
Deep-tech, being a fairly nascent industry, was still not widely understood in India. There was a lack of awareness in the industry and companies leveraging deep-tech in their products could find it more difficult to raise capital in comparison to their popular counterparts engaged in B2C e-commerce, aggregator, or app-based business models. This was a serious challenge because deep-tech firms needed more capital than ordinary tech start-ups. Further, commercialization could be hampered by a lack of complementary corporate infrastructure and people resources. Since these technologies were fairly new to the market, finding partners and defining distribution channels might be difficult..
Exhibits
Exhibit I: DeepTech Start-up Base in India
Exhibit II: Future of Deep-tech- Scalable, Innovative and Transformational Solutions in India
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