We Are the Ocean

Two days at the A'Pelago Initiative 2026 in Turku. And why I think Hamburg needs something like it.

1. A Moment for the Ocean

All life began in water. The salt in our blood is not a coincidence, it is an inheritance. We carry the sea around inside us and have still managed to stop seeing it.

We talk about the seven seas. There is only one. Susanna Thimmig Johansen of the Voice of the Ocean Foundation put it plainly in the opening keynote: there is one ocean. Every river, every bay, every coastline hangs on it. The Baltic outside Turku and the Pacific are the same water on a different day.

A few numbers from the stage that I have not been able to shake since:

• Around 2/3 of the oxygen we breathe comes from the sea. Not from the rainforest. From phytoplankton.
• More than three billion people depend on the ocean for a meaningful share of their protein.
• The ocean is the planet's largest natural carbon sink and has absorbed most of the excess heat we have generated since industrialisation.
• More than a billion people live directly on the coast.
• And we barely know it. Roughly 0.001 percent of the seafloor has ever been observed.

We have better maps of Mars than of the ground outside our own front door. Meanwhile, less than 0.01 percent of global venture capital goes into ocean topics.

Sindre Østgård laid out the other side of that equation. On a business-as-usual trajectory, up to 50 percent of global GDP is at stake between 2070 and 2100, and a significant share of that is avoidable if capital moves into ocean health.

This is not a conservation topic. It is infrastructure, and we are treating the planet's largest operating system like a hobby.

2. A'Pelago: How Two Hypotheses Became an Ecosystem

A'Pelago was founded in 2022 by Patrik Anckar and Timo Ketonen, out of a contradiction you can see in Finland every day. The country has ranked as the happiest in the world nine years running. The sea in front of it is among the most polluted in the world. That contrast became the founding mandate.

Two hypotheses at the start. First, the archipelago is a place for collaboration. Second, the archipelago is a living lab where solutions can be tested under real conditions.

2023 brought a booking platform for coworking venues across the archipelago, today 15 locations including the A'Pelago Yacht. The same year saw the first Initiative in Korpoström, with 162 participants from eight countries, 21 speakers and eight startups reviewed by PE and VC investors.

2024 brought the accelerator. The idea was born at the dinner of that first Initiative, when Inka Mero of Voima Ventures said: if you love the sea this much, build a programme for it. Ten startups in the first cohort, three newly founded companies as a direct result, and a rating of 4.7 out of 5 from participants and coaches.

2025 turned a regional movement into a Nordic engine. The Blue Connect ecosystem platform launched during a 24-hour innovation cruise. The second accelerator ran with 14 startups. The Blue Economy Academy for students was created. And in Turku the Blue Economy Centre opened, the first physical hub of its kind in the region. The Pitch Challenge was added on top.

2026 was the fourth edition. Around 350 participants, Ruissalo Boatyard, themes: From Ocean Literacy to Action and Bridging the Finance Gap.

These Are Modules, Not an Event

• The Event. The annual forum. Curated, capped in size, so that conversations happen instead of broadcasting.
• The Pitch Challenge. Four categories, investor juries, and a winner who gets more than visibility: a seat in the finals of the Turku Startup Prize.
• The accelerator track. Nordic Blue and Northern Blues for scaling, LabOff for researchers, a dedicated programme with the DIWA project for doctoral students, and now the Nordic Ocean Cluster Accelerator NOCA, funded by Nordic Innovation with partners from Norway, Iceland and Denmark.
• The Blue Economy Academy. Students who enter the field early. Two of them were on the event team in Turku.
• The Blue Economy Centre. The physical anchor. Startups, Redstone, service providers and research on one floor.
• Blue Connect. The digital backbone, so connections do not end with the last day of the conference.
• The venues. The archipelago itself as a test environment, and as a place where people talk to each other differently than in a convention centre.

Around 2,500 professionals and more than 500 organisations now sit inside that ecosystem. None of it started as a masterplan. Each piece came out of a gap someone hit while building the piece before it.

What Actually Holds It Together

What matters is not the number of modules. It is who sits at the table.

In Turku that meant the city and Business Turku, the universities Åbo Akademi, University of Turku, Turku UAS and Novia, industrial companies including Wärtsilä, Vaisala, Sandvik, Meriaura and Elomatic, foundations such as the John Nurminen Foundation and Voice of the Ocean, investors from the EIB through Redstone Blue, DOEN Ventures, Aether Capital and Beyond Impact to the ReOcean Fund, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, and in the middle of all of it the founders.

The CEO of Business Turku, Minna Arve, for eight years the mayor of this city, described it in her dinner keynote like this: the researcher finds the insight, the founder finds the business model, the company provides the testing ground, the investor enables scale. Turku has all of these parts. They were simply never in the same room.

And the yardstick here is not financial return alone. Sindre Østgård calls it Triple Return: financial, social and environmental, weighted equally in every investment decision, plus the question of how critical the impact is to Earth system tipping points. That last part is what turns a portfolio question into a question about what we hand over to our children.

3. Two Days, Condensed

Susanna Thimmig Johansen, Voice of the Ocean. Ocean governance is fragmented, everyone holds one piece. The SDG 14 funding gap has shifted: the question is no longer where the money is, but how ambition becomes a bankable pipeline. Her closing line: find the one thing only you can move.

Sindre Østgård, We Are Human. 124 trillion dollars change generations over the next 25 years, and family capital thinks in longer horizons than institutional capital. The target: at least 10 billion dollars for ocean health in ten years.

Panel, Driving the Blue Economy. Lena Bergström, Tuomas Riski and Maria Laamanen, moderated by Christine Spiten. Climate and biodiversity are not competing goals, and eutrophication, the Baltic's core problem, starts on land. Riski's most sober line: the greenest value in shipping is the dollar. Norsepower proved the fuel savings back in 2013, but a five to six year payback was too long, and the industry needs two to three. The Nordic gap is not technology, it is commercialisation.

Origin by Ocean and Elomatic. The most honest session of the two days. De-risking is not a cost line, it is value creation, and too many European deep-tech companies die in the valley of death because they underinvest in it. The line I took home: projects rarely fail because the steel does not fit, they fail because the people do not fit.

Panel, Corporate Venturing. Sandvik, Patria, Vaisala and Elomatic on escaping pilot purgatory. Test whether the need is real before you start, stay close to where it actually hurts, and build trust with clear IP rules. Vaisala treats regulation as a roadmap rather than a brake.

Fireside chat, Cross-Sector Alliances. Jonathan Hed and Annamari Arrakoski-Engardt, anchored in the ozone layer: the Montreal Protocol was signed and in force within a few years. If we fixed that, we can fix the ocean. The thought that stuck with me: we always de-risk the startup, when we should be de-risking the customer.

Day 2, panel: Balancing Return, Risk and Impact. Jaani Pietikäinen (EIB), Simona Chiavassa (ReOcean), Sagar Tandon (Beyond Impact) and Klas Johansen (Redstone Blue), moderated by Kristiina Michelsson. The EIB deploys around 8 billion euro into VC and PE funds, 400 million of it dedicated to the blue economy. Tandon's warning to the impact crowd: a green premium does not scale in thin-margin industries, so run the techno-economic and the impact analysis in the same pass. Johansen's point: we need exits. No returns, no second fund.

Ecosystem Wins. Redstone Blue announced its first close on the same stage where the fund was launched a year ago. 22 investors from the Nordics, Europe and the US, and the first blue economy fund based in the Baltic Sea region. The thesis in four words: the ocean is investable.

New programmes. NOCA and Northern Blues launched. Alina Sippolainen's diagnosis landed: the Nordic ecosystems know more about Indonesia than about each other.

Ocean Matcher. Martin Moen presented the platform connecting philanthropic capital with vetted ocean projects. 350 projects, 49 funders. In the pilot, the Lumen Foundation secured 1.2 million euro from a German foundation for a five-year Baltic biodiversity project across Sweden, Finland and Estonia.

The Pitch Challenge

I sat on the investor jury for Category III, Ocean Tech, alongside Zoe Peden (Ananda VC), Simona Chiavassa (ReOcean Fund, Monaco Asset Management) and Jim Cantrell (Phantom Space). A rocket builder, an impact investor and two fund people arguing over the same five-minute pitches.

18 startups competed across four categories. Scored on commercial viability, innovation, technology readiness, clear impact pathways with measurable metrics, team dynamics and technical competence.

Congratulations to the winner NIDO, a biotech startup that makes carbon-negative hydrogel panels from marine macroalgae for sustainable timber construction. The prize: an acceleration consultation from Netlight worth 5,000 euro, visibility, mentorship from A'Pelago, and a place in the finals of the Turku Startup Prize 2026, where 25,000 euro is on the table.

4. Where Ocean One Ventures Fits In

A'Pelago cuts the blue economy into four domains: Marine Biomaterials, Blue Food and Coastal Innovation, Ocean Tech, and Maritime Solutions. Materials, food, data and engineering, and commercial shipping.

What stays structurally underweighted in that split is the place where people actually meet the sea. Maritime leisure. Yachting, building, charter, marinas, boat clubs, crew, insurance, training. A sector with serious economic weight, in which the software runs on average ten years behind everything else. That is where we invest with Ocean One Ventures: pre-seed and seed, B2B software, across DACH, the UK, the Mediterranean and the Nordics.

The reason is not only the market gap. It is a line I said more than once in Turku: you only protect what you can see. Anyone who has spent three days out there makes different decisions afterwards. Maritime leisure is the front door through which millions of people enter the ocean, so that door should work, and it should do less damage than it currently does.

And we are building the same kind of ecosystem, only smaller and with a different centre of gravity. Curated events instead of large conferences. An accelerator with a few selected companies instead of broad cohorts. Practical support for founders, from structuring to first customer. And the role of external innovation catalyst for established operators who know they have to change but do not want to set up their own venture unit for it.

Turku has shown that this works when you keep at it for years and do not stop after the first event. Let's build something awesome together. We are the Ocean.