And it’s true. What’s coming out of ocean and climate tech right now is extraordinary. You can make freshwater with nothing but sunlight. You can make plastic packaging out of seaweed. Whatever you can imagine, someone in a lab or a garage has probably already built a working version of it.

So why is it so hard to scale them?

Because the technology gets proven, and then it stalls. A brilliant invention becomes a company that never quite becomes a business. The hard part isn't invention anymore. It's everything that comes after: early commercialisation, turning a proven technology into a company that sells it.

60% of clean technologies are ready to commercialize and scale. Yet they're stuck, a $135–200 billion deployment opportunity waiting through 2030." (Source: CREO Advisory, Oct 2025)

Venture capital wants the next breakthrough. Infrastructure capital wants the finished, de-risked asset. Almost nobody is built for the stretch in between. The ocean made that impossible to ignore. It’s one of the biggest and most overlooked markets in climate tech, and the planet doesn’t have time for good ideas to die in the gap between invention and scale. The solutions are here. The execution isn’t.

This is why Fred and I started Rypples.

Frédéric and I have been friends and sailors for most of our lives, a lot of our thinking, including the idea for Rypples, happened on the water. Across our careers, we built companies: I founded SmartRecruiters (acquired by SAP), the hiring platform connecting 150 million people to jobs a year; Fred co-founded EcoVadis and scaled it into the world’s leading sustainability ratings platform. We’re operators before we’re investors. We know the stretch to commercialisation, from being inside the company and we kept seeing proven ocean technologies stalling there, over and over. We decided to do something about it. The best ocean technologies, the most promising ones, should be reaching planetary scale. Right now, they're not. We spent a long time working out how to change that, how to build the growth engine that actually closes the gap.

What “Your Vision. At Planetary Scale” means

So before we built anything, Fred and I asked ourselves one question: if you’re a founder with a proven ocean technology and a planetary-scale vision, what would you actually need from an investor? Not what’s easy to offer, what would genuinely get you there. Everything about Rypples is our answer to that question.

Firstly, you’d need an investor built to last. We’re a holding company and that means you own real, liquid equity rather than an LP interest while the founders we back get a partner that invests from its own balance sheet, keeps reinvesting as the companies scale, and shows up as a co-founder, not a passive shareholder.

Secondly, you’d need someone who can actually help you execute. Since Fred and I are operators ourselves, we believe in the power of backing every company with a dedicated operator on its board from day one. We establish a clear execution plan, not only for the board but the CEO and the senior executive team.

Thirdly, you’d need more than one good operator, you’d need a whole engine behind you. So behind every company stands a dedicated success team, with real operating experience across key function. Additionally we provide various playbooks that get sharper every time the engine runs. It’s a system built for repeatable success.

That’s the shape of it: built to last, hyper-focused on execution, and a platform engineered for success. It all comes back to one promise we make to our founders: Your vision. At Planetary Scale.

What we have done so far

We’ve invested in 12 companies across five ocean verticals and engaged them in our growth-readiness program (more on that in a future post). Getting there meant speaking with over 100 founders, creating our own due diligence process, and becoming clear on the verticals where we could add the most value. Every conversation sharpened our view of where the real bottlenecks are, what founders actually need at this stage, and where we can move the needle. We’ve also used this year to build the foundation underneath all of it: the team, the operators, the playbooks, and the structure that lets us do this at scale. We built that foundation to be the growth engine for ocean innovation.

What comes next

We’ve reached the point where the model is real, the portfolio is real, and the base is solid enough to open the doors wider. As we keep on meeting founders with proven ocean technologies, we’re ready to welcome more investors into the holding company, people who want to own equity in something built to last, with real governance rights and liquidity, run by operators focused on building share value rather than gathering assets.

This Substack is where we’ll tell that story as it unfolds: the founders we’re backing, the lessons from inside the work, and what it actually takes to scale ocean innovation.

Ocean innovation is already here. Our job is to make sure it reaches scale.

That’s why Rypples exists.

Jerome

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