The future of seafood is on land.
SHRMP.bio combines molecular biology, bioprocessing and automation with the scale and simplicity of traditional aquafarming. The intent is seafood produced close to its markets, away from climate-exposed coastlines, and traceable from raw material to finished product.
Further than it should be. Not as far as it needs to go.
Announced in February 2024. Since then: an Audience Choice Award at Startmate's LaunchClub pitch night, a place in Buildmate, laboratory access and student teams at the University of Melbourne, and a body of published analysis on where seafood production is heading.
What remains is a pilot facility, and the research required to justify one. That is larger than a founder and a student team — which is an accurate description of the company today.
One founder, so far.
SHRMP.bio was started by Dr Gregor Lichtfuss, who turned a decade of cardiac RNA research into Cardior Pharmaceuticals — acquired by Novo Nordisk in 2024 — and co-founded Exopharm (ASX:EX1), where he proposed and delivered the Plexoval programme: the first-in-human trial of a platelet-derived exosome therapeutic, run with Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
The same pharmaceutical bioprocessing discipline, pointed at seafood. The full record, including the parts that did not work, is at lichtfuss.earth.
A research home.
If you run or fund research in aquaculture, food security or industrial bioprocessing, there is a body of work here that should continue somewhere better resourced: four future scenarios, a technology-trend analysis, an experimental programme, and the beginnings of a prototype.
We are not a feed company, and not a supplement company. We are not, at present, a company with a laboratory of its own either. The science is sound and the arithmetic is unsentimental: this belongs with people who can build the facility.
Everything we published is still online.
How to predict the future and whether it can be done at all. Four scenarios across technology and climate. The human population by 2050. Trade. Aquaculture technology trends. Why anyone would try to build this in Australia. It is long, it is unhurried, and most of it was written in late 2024.