Seaweed is frequently used to wrap sushi and flavour soups, but it has much larger potential as a food and in a variety of other products, including biodegradable packaging, cosmetics, textiles, and even biofuel.

Normal seaweed cultivation takes place on nets or ropes floating in the water, but contemporary methods make this virtually impossible. Shrikumar Suryanarayan, co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Sea6 Energy and former head of research and development at Biocon, an Indian pharmaceutical business that specialises in biologically-sourced medications, claims that ocean farming is in the 'stone ages.' 'It's like farming with a trowel and a pick,' one person said.

With its 'Sea Combine,' an automated catamaran that simultaneously gathers and replants seaweed in the ocean, Sea6 Energy, a company that was founded in 2010, seeks to mechanise ocean farming in the same way that tractors did for farmland. Back and forth between seaweed rows, the machine harvests fully developed plants and replaces them with newly seeded rows.

On the seaweed farm owned by the business off the coast of Indonesia, a prototype is currently in use. Suryanarayan claims that the Southeast Asian country has a long-standing tradition of seaweed farming, in which locals hand harvest the lines after tying seaweed pieces to ropes and carrying them out to sea.

The company plans to deploy more Sea Combines as technology advances and the market expands, notably in India, where it is based.

According to market research firm Fortune Business Insights, despite the fact that the worldwide seaweed sector more than doubled in size between 2005 and 2015 and generated 33 million metric tonnes in 2018, labor-intensive and expensive production is predicted to restrain market growth.

According to Suryanarayan, the cost of seaweed limits its potential usage, and in the current market, seaweed is frequently only economically feasible for high-priced culinary applications.

In order to increase the use of seaweed, Suryanarayan thinks that the Sea Combine will reduce costs. In order to increase the use of seaweed, Suryanarayan thinks that the Sea Combine will reduce costs. He thinks that since village cooperatives might rent the equipment and use it to farm a bigger region, doing this won't harm the local economy. 

According to Suryanarayan, the Sea Combine is merely 'a tool' in the larger operation of Sea6 Energy. According to him, the business, which has garnered $20 million in capital, now produces limited amounts of things like animal feed and agricultural fertiliser using the seaweed that the machine harvests.

Suryanarayan thinks that it is now at a 'inflexion point' because the groundwork has been laid, technology has been developed, and there is a lot of interest in the potential of seaweed to slow down climate change on a global scale.