KALY Group Ltd, a natural capital investment company focused on developing marine environment projects, has made significant strides in the six months since receiving an initial investment from The TRICAPITAL Syndicate LLP and Scottish Enterprise. The licensing process for Kaly's first commercial scale kelp farm in Loch Bay near Stein, northwest Skye, is well underway with Marine Scotland.

Kaly's go-to-market strategy has expanded to include integration into the fast-growing seaweed biostimulant product category for use on land-based crops and soil. This move aims to enhance topsoil quality and reduce synthetic nitrogen and mined phosphorus use in agriculture while simultaneously remediating harmful nutrient loads in the sea from agricultural runoffs and finfish aquaculture. Working with the Scottish Institute for Marine Sciences and the James Hutton Institute, Kaly is developing a methodology to quantify the environmental benefits of this process.

Kaly is also working on other natural capital projects, including native oyster bed restoration. The company aims to become the leading developer and advocate for the inclusion of marine habitats in emerging nature markets in the UK.

Seaweed farming is an industry with great potential for growth, as the global seaweed market has more than tripled since 2000, with most market forecasts predicting a double-digit compound annual growth rate over the next decade.

TRICAPITAL's managing partner, Moray Martin, commented on the investment, saying: "Kaly aims to add significant capacity to the Scottish seaweed industry in the next few years. As well as significant economic benefits, seaweed farming can play a huge part in pushing back against climate change by absorbing carbon, regenerating marine ecosystems, creating biofuel and renewable plastics as well as generating marine protein.”

Co-Founder of Kaly Group, commented, Daniel Hillman, said: “To successfully develop natural capital in the marine environment, we understand there is a larger exercise of laying the ‘plumbing’ for entirely new value chains and markets. Starting a seaweed farm or an oyster bed and calling it a day was never an option for us. Kaly is creating not only the physical infrastructure to enable a certain degree of scale in the production of farmed seaweed, but also the market mechanisms and governance structures that will allow for UK farmed seaweed to be widely accessible to consumers in various useful products and priced according to its inherent value to people and planet.

This underpins our entire approach to natural capital - that nature needs to have a price that says it’s worth protecting and enhancing. Some may be content to sit back and wait for these frameworks and structures to emerge spontaneously, but at Kaly we are committed to being a shaping force in the development of a farmed seaweed industry and in the nature markets currently being implemented by the UK government and around the world.”