We back the founders building the next layer of ocean innovation, and we want to take you along for it. The ocean is producing extraordinary things, from fresh water made with sunlight to packaging grown from seaweed. The technology works. What keeps failing is everything after it, the hard stretch where a proven invention has to become a company that scales.

So we built Rypples to own that stretch. As a holding company, we invest from our own balance sheet, keep reinvesting as our companies grow, and stand beside founders as co-founders rather than passive shareholders, with a dedicated operator on every board from day one and a full success team behind them.

Everything about Rypples comes from one question we asked ourselves: if you were a founder with a proven ocean technology and a planetary-scale vision, what would you actually need from an investor? You can find our answer, and everything Rypples stands for in our first piece ‘Your Vision. At Planetary Scale’.

A Bold Vision — The future without plastic

In every issue we hand the opening to one of our founders and let them describe the world their work is building toward. So in the spirit of Your Vision. At Planetary Scale., what would that look like for Julia and Sway?

Fifteen trillion plastic bags and mailers are produced every year. Can we actually get rid of them all? Julia has spent years proving the answer is YES. With Sway she makes packaging from seaweed that acts as plastic and then simply composts. Sway’s packaging is already in the market, with major brands signing on.

A Deep Dive — Should you sell, or should you grow?

It is one of the hardest questions a growth founder ever faces, and Chiara Petrioli of WSENSE, one of the founders we back, recently had to answer it. Her decision became our first exit.

Some calls are obvious. You have run out of TAM, your investors are tired, dilution took the decision out of your hands, or a new entrant is hammering you. But what happens when everything is going right? You are growing two to three times a year, your TAM has no ceiling in sight, customers are happy, investors are excited, and then a strategic offer lands on the table. How do you decide then?

It is tempting to think the deciding factor is money, but for a mission driven founder it never really is. Ringing the Nasdaq bell is seductive too, though a risky thing to chase. What actually settles the question is the mission. When a founder truly believes a deal will accelerate the mission, taking it is the right call, even if that means passing on a Series B while everything is still going great.

Chiara invented underwater wifi, wireless subsea networks that connect sensors, robots and divers in real time. She is on a mission to give the ocean a voice. Fincantieri, as a global powerhouse of maritime, committed €600 million to acquire four companies and build one vertically integrated underwater operator. WSENSE was chosen as the connective layer that ties everything together. That partnership makes WSENSE the standard for underwater communications and carries Chiara’s mission further, and faster, than another funding round could have.

This is our first exit, and we could not be prouder of who it belongs to. Jerome wrote his perspective here. We backed Chiara and worked closely with her and the team through this very decision. A milestone worth celebrating across the whole ocean-tech community. Huge congratulations to Chiara and the entire WSENSE team.

A World First — Fresh water, pulled from the deep

In Norway, Alexander and the Flocean team switched on the first commercial plant Flocean One at Mongstad, that makes fresh water 500 meters below the surface.

At that depth the ocean’s own pressure drives the process, so desalination runs about 40% more efficient with no chemicals, no harmful brine, and no coastal land taken up. Desalination has been energy-hungry and stuck on land for decades. Flocean just showed us what comes next. For island nations and coastal towns running short on fresh water, Flocean could make all the difference. The future of fresh water is subsea.

Live from Rypples HQ

A quick look at what we have been up to in the first half of the year.

• The team is growing. Ophelia Chua joined us early in the year as CFOO and we brought on Cordula Pfluegl, as Head of Marketing, because the ocean has far too few people telling its stories. And congrats to Sofia on her promotion to Investment Manager.

• Summer kicked off at the Blue Economy and Finance Forum in Monaco, where four of our founders pitched on the main stage. Jerome took the stage alongside Marble to make the case for how technology can turn marine protected areas from lines on a map into a reality. You can watch the presentation here.

• We finalised our company registration in Abu Dhabi Global Market. ADGM provides us with a globally positioned sustainable finance and impact investing ecosystem aligned with our mandate, supported by strong and trusted English Common Law framework, and a competitive tax-efficient regime.

• We have backed 12 ocean companies across five verticals (ocean intelligence, ecosystems, maritime, blue foods and ocean health), the result of sitting down with more than 100 founders over the last year. Meeting so many people building for the ocean has been the best part of it, and we are not slowing down. A few new investments are already in closing. Stay tuned.

Introducing the Ocean Scalers program

Scaling a company is lonely. Really lonely. And for ocean founders, the technology is rarely what breaks them. It is the leap from brilliant founder to the CEO who can take the whole thing to scale, and nobody should have to make that leap alone. So we built the room we always wished existed, where ocean CEOs So we built the room we always wished existed, a place where ocean CEOs push each other forward.
Ocean Scalers is our peer-to-peer program built to help CEOs grow faster and reach their planetary-scale vision, putting them in carefully matched groups to learn from the founders facing the very same challenges. We will tell and show more at our invite-only founders breakfast during Climate Week in New York. If you know an ocean founder who would thrive in it, nominate them or forward this along: The Ocean Scalers Breakfast

Come find us in September!

If you’d like us at one of your events, want to explore a partnership, or want to join one of our curated formats for founders and family offices, just reply to this email.

• AT ONE Singapore Impact Week - September 8–12. We’ll be there hosting a session at the 4th Annual Gathering of 1000 Ocean Startups, and we're looking to meet founders and family offices in the region.

• The Drop - Malmö, September 15–16. Together with James Lindsay of Builders Vision, we’re hosting a Ripple titled ‘Ocean: too early or misfunded?’ on the 16th of September. Make sure to get your spot here.

• NY Climate Week - September 20-26. Amongst other events, Jerome will be speaking at The Nest’s Main Stage on September 23rd on ‘What is the ocean worth?’. Get your complimentary ticket here.

That is Vol 1. We are building Rypples in the open, so tell us what landed and what didn't. And if you know someone who cares about the ocean reaching scale, forward this along.

The Rypples team

Rypples is the growth engine to scale ocean innovation. We back market-ready ocean technology and drive the execution that gets it to scale. Your Vision. At Planetary Scale.



*Nothing in this newsletter is an offer or solicitation to invest in Rypples. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results. Past results do not indicate future performance.

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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