Sea Combine

Often used to wrap sushi and flavor soups, seaweed has much greater potential - both as a food and for [blank] in a wide range of products from cosmetics and textiles to biodegradable packaging and even biofuel. Usually, seaweed is grown on ropes or nets suspended in the ocean, but current techniques [blank] large-scale cultivation near impossible. The price of seaweed restricts its potential uses and in the current market, it's often only economically viable to use seaweed for high-priced food applications. Founded in 2010, Sea Energy wants to mechanize ocean farming, just as tractors did for agriculture, with its "Sea Combine," an automated catamaran that simultaneously harvests and replants seaweed in the ocean. Suryanarayan hopes the Sea Combine will cut costs and make seaweed [blank] so it can be more widely used. The machine travels back and forth between lines of seaweed, harvesting the fully-grown plants and replacing them with freshly-seeded lines. As the technology develops and the market widens, the company intends to deploy [blank] Sea Combines, including in its home country, India.