Anyone who has worked with startup companies knows that it generally takes twice as long and double the dollars to get a company off the ground. In the case of Oberon FMR, now called Nutrinsic, it took seven full years.

The company was started with a concept and some nice experiments done in Norway, not quite at the “business plan on a napkin” level.    While doing a postdoctoral fellowship in Norway, Colorado School of Mines graduate Andy Logan came upon a method to take waste water streams from food processing plants and turn them into high quality protein production processes. The resulting product turned out to be a source of protein that was ideal for fish consumption. As you can see in the graph below, the amount of fish eaten in the world continues to increase about 8% per year, while the amount of wild catch fish leveled off around 1990. Since then, that shortfall has been filled by the aquaculture industry, still in its infancy. Unfortunately, it generally takes several pounds of small fish (herring, anchovies, etc) to make one pound of farmed fish, obviously an unsustainable model. Hence, the need for Profloc, which is the brand name for the Nutrinsic fish meal replacement protein.

Founder Andy Logan brought in fellow engineer Seth Terry as a partner, and the two founders brought in Randy Swenson as a business guy to help get the company going. HCV helped the team write the first full business plan, which attracted the first lead investor in Aquacopia, a VC firm that focuses on aquaculture innovation. Two CEO changes and one global financial implosion later, the company finally broke ground this week on its first US plant in Trenton, Ohio, with Miller Coors as its first partner.

Saturday night at the board dinner we ate some fantastic Cobia, a species of fish being farmed at one of Aquacopia’s portfolio companies in Panama. It was delicious, and a sign of the development of the aquaculture industry. I look forward to eating more Cobia, fed with the sustainable fish meal replacement Profloc in the near future. Congratulations to the team at Nutrinsic! Perseverance is a large part of success in the startup world.