Most people think coral reefs are just pretty scenery. The kind you admire between cocktails and snorkeling photos.
That belief is quietly wrecking coastlines, economies, and food systems.
Coral reefs are not decoration. They are living infrastructure, natural seawalls, fish nurseries, tourism engines, and medicine cabinets layered into one ecosystem. When reefs disappear, the bill shows up fast, and it’s usually paid by the people least equipped to absorb it.
The Problem Isn’t Awareness, It’s Scale
In this Ignite Podcast episode, Sam Teicher, co-founder and Chief Reef Officer of Coral Vita, makes a blunt observation. The world does not lack concern for coral reefs. It lacks scalable systems to restore them.
Traditional reef restoration works, slowly. Small underwater nurseries, volunteer divers, grant funding that expires right when momentum builds. These efforts are noble, but they were never designed to operate at the pace or scale of reef collapse.
Meanwhile, reefs continue to decline faster than altruism can keep up.
A Contrarian Bet, Make Restoration a Business
Coral Vita started with a simple but uncomfortable reframing. If coral reefs function like infrastructure, then restoring them should be paid for like infrastructure.
Not donations. Customers.
Instead of growing corals underwater one reef at a time, Coral Vita grows them on land in controlled farms. Instead of optimizing purely for scientific elegance, they optimize for speed, resilience, and repeatability. Instead of asking who will donate, they ask who depends on reefs enough to pay for their survival.
Hotels that need vibrant reefs to attract guests. Governments protecting coastlines. Insurers managing storm risk. Developers building in vulnerable regions.
Once reefs are treated as assets, demand appears everywhere.
Compressing Centuries Into Months
One of the quiet breakthroughs behind Coral Vita is not flashy technology, but time compression.
Certain corals naturally take decades, sometimes centuries, to grow. Coral Vita accelerates this process through micro-fragmentation, cutting corals into small pieces that heal and fuse together, triggering rapid growth. Combined with land-based farms, this removes many of the constraints of ocean nurseries, weather, temperature spikes, and limited access.
The result is reefs that can begin functioning almost immediately after replanting, attracting fish, rebuilding structure, and restoring ecosystems far faster than most people assume.
Preparing Corals for the Oceans They’ll Actually Face
Restoring yesterday’s reefs for tomorrow’s oceans doesn’t work.
Coral Vita stress-tests corals under warmer and harsher conditions, selecting naturally resilient genotypes without genetic modification. Think selective breeding, not sci-fi engineering.
The goal isn’t invincible “super corals.” It’s giving reefs a fighting chance in the environments they’re guaranteed to face.
This mindset mirrors good startup strategy. You don’t build for ideal conditions. You build for the market as it really is.
What Founders and Investors Often Get Wrong
One of the most pointed parts of the conversation is Sam’s critique of how impact is often measured.
Planting things is easy. Restoring systems is hard.
Headline numbers, like how many trees planted or corals deployed, hide the real questions. Did they survive? Did biodiversity increase? Did local communities benefit or get sidelined?
For nature tech to work, people matter as much as the planet. Local knowledge, local jobs, and long-term stewardship are not optional extras. They are prerequisites for durable impact.
Why Biodiversity Will Become Investable
A core belief Sam holds is that biodiversity will become investable in its own right, without needing a carbon story attached.
For years, nature-based solutions were forced into carbon accounting frameworks to justify themselves. That framing is breaking. Ecosystems generate value whether or not they sequester measurable tons of carbon.
Reefs protect coastlines, support fisheries, power tourism economies, and reduce disaster risk. Those benefits exist with or without carbon credits.
Investors are starting to notice.
Building a Market While Building a Company
Coral Vita isn’t just scaling operations. It’s scaling understanding.
Education becomes a growth function when decision-makers don’t realize how much they depend on what’s underwater. Selling reef restoration often means explaining why a reef matters to property values, insurance premiums, or national security.
It’s slow. It’s hard. And it’s exactly how new markets are born.
The Bigger Pattern
Coral Vita feels less like a one-off startup and more like a prototype.
A glimpse of what happens when we stop asking how to minimize damage and start asking how to rebuild broken systems. When infrastructure includes living things. When nature belongs on the income statement, not just in the sustainability report.
Sam says he hopes one day Coral Vita puts itself out of business because reefs are fine again. That may be unrealistic. But the ambition matters.
Because every restored reef buys time. For coastal communities. For food systems. For generations who deserve more than concrete seawalls and warning signs.
Sometimes saving the world doesn’t start with a protest.
It starts with a company built around the idea that nature is worth restoring, and worth paying for.
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Chapters:
00:01 Introduction to Sam Teicher and Coral Vita
02:17 From Policy and NGOs to Building a Business
04:17 Restoration as a Service Model Explained
06:41 Pricing Reef Restoration and Customer Economics
09:29 Coastal Protection and Insurance Angle
11:55 Market Size and the $100B Opportunity
14:13 Land-Based Coral Farms vs Ocean Nurseries
15:09 Micro-Fragmentation and Accelerated Growth
17:10 Climate Stress, Ocean Warming, and Resilient Corals
19:44 Genetic Engineering and the Future of Coral Science
23:09 Revenue Streams and Series A Funding
26:35 Long-Term Vision for the Restoration Economy
Transcript
Sam Teicher (00:00:00): It’s not just us and Coral Vita that’s successful and thriving, but there’s been this roadmap for a thousand other Coral Vitas and terrestrial and other marine ecosystems too, that people are putting money into this. We’re investing in the ecosystem, in the local communities. It’s showed that this is just, it’s a win, win, win, because it is. I mean, again, if you can restore a reef that’s a living seawall that protects your roads and homes from storms, it’s also tourism acid, boost fish populations, and is cheaper than the alternative. It’s like, kind of, why not? And, you know, maybe we’re also doing mangrove restoration and seagrass restoration and the tech is just doing all sorts of amazing things and we can bring in roboticists and all other forms of people from across the spectrum where it’s not just the marine scientists and people who care and do good and love the reefs, but we’re bringing in coders and software engineers and AI specialists and systems thinkers and really creating this thriving system and restoration economy that takes care of the ecosystems that take care of us.
Brian Bell (00:01:20): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have Sam Teicher on the mic. He is co-founder and chief reef officer at Coral Vita, a mission-driven company growing climate resilient corals and restoring dying reefs at scale. Sam’s journey spans early scuba diving, policy work at the White House, and launching a for-profit restoration model out of Yale. Thanks for coming on, Sam.
Sam Teicher (00:01:39): Thanks so much for having me, Brian.
Brian Bell (00:01:40): Appreciate it. Well, I’d love to start with your origin story. What’s your background?
Sam Teicher (00:01:44): There’s a lot of ways I could answer that, but I guess as it relates to the work I’m doing with coral reef restoration, the first time I saw a coral reef, I was six years old. So that’s one of my happiest, earliest memories, just Being in sort of this lava rock lagoon on the island of Hawaii, the big island, and just seeing all these different shapes and colors and just being totally mesmerized by it. Didn’t think I was going to grow up and become a coral farmer from the famous tropical waters of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., But I always loved nature, you know, roll over logs in my parents’ backyard and look at bugs, go hiking in the Shenandoahs or fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. And I also was always sort of drawn towards fixing problems. So my parents sort of instilled in me and my brother’s belief about being able to fix problems if we saw or felt the need to. My dad worked on making peace in the Middle East before I was born, which unfortunately wasn’t as successful as we all would have liked, but he was working at the highest levels of policy on that. Many have tried. You gave it the old college try for sure. That’s right. I went to DC public schools. I was interested in education reform. I was interested in peacemaking and international security. I was interested in just, yeah, these big problems. And then in college, I ultimately studied political science. I’ll go on the record and say I don’t have a marine science background. I have much smarter people than me on our team at Coral Vita doing the good work. But I was always sort of, you know, connecting the dots and was looking at climate change and the destruction of nature as this thing where ultimately, in addition, just again, that deep love for nature, if you’re concerned about economic prosperity, refugees, public health, any of those things, if you’re concerned about public health, you’re concerned about national security and refugees, any of these things, in addition to just the magic and the wonder and inspiration of the environment, as it dies, as it degrades, it impacts all. It is an existential world. crisis, but it’s one that really ultimately affects humanity. And there’s sort of this aha moment for me in college. And so I concentrated my studies in that space. I got into grad school, the Yale School of the Environment, took a gap year, went to go work for my friend’s NGO, Eli Africa in Mauritius, where I helped set up the environmental branch and ended up getting a grant from the United Nations to do a traditional Coral farming project, setting up a sort of an underwater garden is a magical experience. Saw a reef come back to life working with local communities and also saw that from a scaling perspective, from a ecological perspective and from a funding perspective, grants and donations are not going to cut it. What if we could come up with a new model to scale impact better? I met my co-founder Gator Halpern in our master’s program. He felt he was writing the obituary for the planet from an academic perspective. I had the NGO frustrations as well as working at the White House and for a coalition of island nation governments, knowing what’s possible and needed in that world, but also the limits of bureaucratic inertia. We got a thousand dollar grant from school to test out a business idea over a decade ago for a coral restoration company. And we’ve been going ever since. It’s amazing.
Brian Bell (00:04:35): Wow. And so it’s kind of social entrepreneurship, triple bottom line kind of stuff. But it’s not just like, hey, donate to us so we can save the reefs. It’s like, no, we can actually create a business around this. There’s lots of resorts and governments and people who care about this that will actually pay for restoration as a service.
Sam Teicher (00:04:53): That’s the thesis, yeah, is instead of that grant from the UN, which I’m still grateful for, but let me tell you, it was not an easy process and wasn’t for a lot of money and that didn’t get renewed. And that was the end of the project, right? It let us grow 5,000 corals once in the island, Asia and Mauritius. And that one country alone needs closer to maybe 5 million corals a year. So that traditional approach, just it really doesn’t cut it. So if you take a step back from the magic and the wonder of coral reefs, they’re one of the most valuable and important ecosystems on the planet. It’s estimated that they generate $2.7 trillion every year. They power tourism economies. They act like sea walls and protect coastlines from storms. There are medicines on the market fighting cancer to viral infections to arthritis that derive from organisms living on the reefs. So you’ve got then a billion people in about 100 countries and territories and a quarter of all marine life that depends on this one ecosystem. Half of coral reefs have died since the 1970s. We’re on track to lose over 90% by 2050. So basically in 80 years, an average human lifespan, we can lose one of the most incredible ecosystems. And then with that true tragedy, that’s a lot of value. That’s a lot of lives. That’s a lot of a lot that’s on the line. And so our thinking was, yes, if we can get the hotels, governments, developers, insurance companies, everyone who depends on the benefits the reefs provide and is at risk from those reefs dying can hire. company like Coral Vita to restore the reefs they depend on. Then we can sort of create this revenue-based model to fund the millions and ultimately billions of corals we need to keep reefs alive for the future.
Brian Bell (00:06:27): So how does it work? What is the cost? I’m a hotel sitting somewhere where there’s a reef deteriorating and I’d like to see the reef come back. My wife and I just got back from Bora Bora for our 20th and they had at the Conrad They had a bunch of restoration. You could go snorkel through them and had this one dome structure underneath with the, I guess, electrical current was flowing through trying to stimulate reef growth and stuff. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but so like a hotel would approach you and say, okay, yeah, we’d like to get the reef going here. Like how much are they usually willing to pay? And what does it cost like per acre? How do you price it and stuff?
Sam Teicher (00:07:02): Well, we work in the marine world, it’s per hectare, by like 2.2 acres. And everyone’s favorite answer, it depends, but the cost of doing the work in Indonesia would be different than the Bahamas would be different than Saudi Arabia. But as a general rule of thumb, about $350,000 to restore a hectare of reef. And that might seem like a lot of money, but if you then put that in the perspective of a hotel, the annual cost for landscaping or for resurfacing the pool deck. And here you’ve got a asset that is drawing in high paying tourists.
Brian Bell (00:07:32): I want to snorkel. I want to see colors. I want to see fish. And it’s really sad. I mean, I’ve lived in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Hawaii has some of the most deteriorated, especially off Oahu, right? You kind of go snorkeling off Oahu and you’re like, this is really sad. Especially compared to some of the places I’ve been snorkeling in the Caribbean. Back when I was 20 years ago, in my 20s, I used to take people around the Caribbean on a Kind of like a boozy kind of cruise, but it was a snorkeling cruise. And I’d guide them through snorkeling trips and stuff. So I’m very familiar with what a good reef looks like and what a bad reef looks like. And I can imagine to a hotel, especially one in Bora Bora or something, you want to have the best looking reef possible for your guests.
Sam Teicher (00:08:10): People are spending a lot of time on that plane. They’re spending a lot of money on the hotel. And yeah, even if they’re not... you know, a coral nerd and super attuned with all the life that’s out there. If they still just want to see pretty fish, they want to see turtles. If there’s no reef, there’s no life. There’s no life. It’s like, if you cut down all the trees in the forest, then there’s not going to be the deer. There’s not going to be the birds.
Brian Bell (00:08:29): Why go to the mountains after the forest burns down?
Sam Teicher (00:08:31): So yeah, no, you’re hitting the nail right on the head and love that you’ve got this experience and background and love. So hopefully we’ll get you out and plant some corals with us down at some of our farms. One of our investors actually is this guy, Tom Cheese, one of the co-founders of Google X. And he’s through us, but actually through other initiatives too, he’s doing a lot of work in the coral restoration space. And that actually was also from seeing the corals near his home in Hawaii die and deteriorate and thinking he’s got to do something about this. So
Brian Bell (00:08:58): I’m sure my sister would love to talk to you guys. She works in San Diego diving. She’s a diver, so she dives like every day, five, six days a week. And they’re doing all kinds of restoration projects down there in SoCal. I’m like counting and planting seaweed and removing invasive seaweed and all the above, right?
Sam Teicher (00:09:16): Invasive urchins and kelp. Yeah, and Gator, my co-founder, is actually a proud San Diegans. So yeah, we’ll definitely have to get up with your sister.
Brian Bell (00:09:23): Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. All right. So like how much hectares does an average hotel need? One would probably do it and you can kind of just kind of line the shore basically.
Sam Teicher (00:09:33): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you could go, you could go down or up. You could do a quarter hectare. You could do five. It does depend on the hotel and what the local needs are. How much degradation? Is it a, At five feet, is it at 30 feet? But another sort of element of it, there’s the tourism angle. I briefly touched on also earlier, coastal protection. So there actually are now coral restoration insurance policies on the market that have had payouts because a healthy reef on average reduces wave energy by 97%. So instead of having to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of building an ugly gray concrete or rock seawall, which is...
Brian Bell (00:10:07): Right, like in Waikiki, this is one of the eyesores now in Waikiki. They had to build those retaining walls to hold the sand in and stop the waves coming in and make it friendly for swimmers.
Sam Teicher (00:10:17): Reefs do that naturally. They don’t cost anything and they have They’re basically living seawalls, and they can regenerate over time. Now, obviously, we’re losing them, and we’ll talk more about how we’re growing more resilient corals to sort of face that. But DARPA, the R&D arm of the U.S. military, had a project called Refence. I love when the military uses puns, but it was looking at how coral and oyster restoration is a more effective and cost-effective means to protect naval bases from erosion and storm surge than concrete seawalls. And I think it’s fair to say that the insurance and industry and the military aren’t your progressive environmentalists, but they are in the business of mitigating risk. And the studies were done that if the oyster reefs off of New Jersey and New York were healthy like they once were when Superstorm Sandy came through, a billion dollars of damages would have been averted. I was living in Grand Bahama where we launched our first farm when Hurricane Dorian came through, one of the strongest storms ever. And mangrove forests, similar role, in addition to all the other benefits they provide, save people’s lives. People we were sort of doing rescue and relief work with credited the mangrove forests that surrounded their island with saving them. And so... Those hotels or governments or whoever else, in addition to that tourism benefit, also can say, oh, maybe I can have my premiums reduced. I know that if I buy into this proactively now, there could be an immediate payout from a sort of a trust to restore those reefs so they don’t degrade over time. So again, from a pure bottom line and dollars and cents perspective, it’s so in the interest of hotels and all these other players to protect these ultimately natural assets.
Brian Bell (00:11:45): So I’m going to put my VC hat on for a second. Well, how do you think about the size of the market? You said it’s a $2 trillion market earlier. That was like a top down kind of all economic activity. If you went and restored all the reefs in the world, how many hectares of reefs do we need at 350,000?
Sam Teicher (00:12:01): We’re talking about $100 billion opportunity. Now that’s not an annually recurring market. That’s just $100 billion, but I think we can feel good about that. And I can talk the math on that. But basically, the U.S. government, believe it or not, historically and still even today, have actually been pretty proactive in the coral restoration space. And it actually is one of the few things that still has bipartisan support. And the folks at NOAA who are leading that space really often set 5% of a reef as a target for restoration, right? You don’t need to cover all the 100% of that hectare with corals if you do it the right way. The forest.
Brian Bell (00:12:36): You don’t have to plant every single tree. Exactly. Because the trees will beget more trees, right?
Sam Teicher (00:12:41): So I’m talking to the right guy here. This is easy conversation. So if you basically take 5% across all the world’s reefs and then multiply that by $350,000 per hectare, you get around $100 billion. Wow, amazing. That’s a lot of money. And at the same time, it’s not that much for really what we’re talking about. And you can sort of put it at the pure $2.7 trillion a year. But if you think about a world without coral reefs, you’re thinking about, again, people can’t feed their families. They can’t pay the bills. Their homes are underwater. The person in your life who’s got cancer can’t get their treatment anymore because the source of the medicine is gone. You’re not able to enjoy your vacations or have a seafood dinner or plate, however small or big. $100 billion to ensure that we have this incredible and incredibly important asset. We got the money to do this. And we have the skill and the technology and the communities who can make it happen.
Brian Bell (00:13:34): And the demand. So how many hectares have you restored and how long does it take to fully restore?
Sam Teicher (00:13:39): So one of the exciting things that we do, so we grow our corals in land-based farms. When I lived in Mauritius, I had this sort of underwater garden project, and that’s how it’s usually done. It’s a lovely day at the office. It’s probably what you were seeing a lot of in Bora Bora. There’s a lot of limitations when it comes to those nurseries. Setting up and maintaining one in every reef that needs to be restored isn’t practical.
Brian Bell (00:13:57): You can kind of do it in a centralized kind of warehouse.
Sam Teicher (00:14:01): With our model, with the land-based farms. Yeah, you can have like an aquaculture park and supply its higher regions, reefs with these corals instead of having to do the work everywhere. And also, if you can walk right up to the tanks to do the work as opposed to having to put on a scuba suit. Go out on a boat and the weather’s not good. We can’t go out there. Or there’s a storm and the whole thing’s jeopardized. Or there’s a spike in temperatures and the corals in your nursery in the ocean could die. So we have higher degrees of control. We’re also able to use these methods to accelerate coral growth. So there’s an open source form of science called microfragmenting. And to just do a little coral 101 for the listeners, a coral is actually an animal that has plants living inside of it that makes rock for a skeleton, which for me is a pretty cool three for one. They’re ancient distant cousins of jellyfish. They just decided to stop moving. So if you look at one piece of coral, a coral colony, it’s actually hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of coral polyps. And they’re each clones of one another, the genetic copies. So it was discovered if you take one piece of coral, you cut it up into these tiny little pieces, these micro fragments, you put them near each other, it triggers a natural healing process, and they’ll fuse back into themselves, almost like scar tissue. So we’ll cut these corals, fuse them back together, cut them up, fuse them back together, because while some corals naturally grow fast, branching corals, they look like deer’s antlers, you take a cutting the size of your thumb, six to 12 months later, it’s the size of your hand and wrist. That’s typically what’s grown in the ocean-based nurseries, but the bouldering corals, the encrusting species and platings, big, massive ones, they could take decades or centuries to reach the same size. We now are growing them in months and years instead of decades and centuries. So typically we’ll grow the corals for about six to 12, maybe up to 24 months. And then we’ll go down with underwater drills and cement or marine epoxy glue and we’ll plug them in. So you can see that reef come back to life pretty quickly and obviously it’ll be a few more years before you’re thinking like it’s a nat geo level reef but almost overnight it’s sort of the if you plant it they will come we’ve seen massive upticks in fish populations practically overnight you’re giving fish that structure homes ways to hide from predators and so you know two-fold increases in fish life populations some of our sites and then another thing we didn’t really touch on also is we often get asked like you know what’s the point all right corals are dying and we We’re not creating super corals that are going to survive anything. If there’s still pollution being dumped in there, we can’t do restoration in that area. But one of the key things that’s killing corals is warming temperatures. Just like if we get sick,
Brian Bell (00:16:20): And the acidification of the ocean, right? Which is part of the warming, but also part of the pollution.
Sam Teicher (00:16:25): Exactly. There’s the absorption of carbon dioxide is changing the water chemistry as the temperature goes up. And so just like if we get a fever, we get sick and then serious things can happen. If it gets too hot for the corals, they also struggle and often can die. And with the land-based farms, we’re incorporating elements of this field of science called assisted evolution. where basically the best analogy I can give is we can give corals the spa treatment or we can take them to the gym. So we can make it from a temperature, a salinity, a pH perspective, just the way they like it to grow fast or to reproduce corals to make babies, or we can stress test the corals. We can mimic future ocean temperatures, raise them, identify which genotypes are naturally more resilient, cross-breed them together so that when we outplant those corals, they can better survive. We’re talking right now in December 2025, our team just did surveys of corals we planted for a project in Dubai. The Arabian Sea is hot. There’s a lot of sedimentation, a lot of coastal construction that’s damaged reefs there. It had near record heat temperatures this summer. And I will be frank and say I didn’t have the highest expectations for how our coral’s done because of all these factors. We planted corals in December 24 and May 25. Two of our corals were dead. I’m not going to guarantee that every time, but knowing that that level of resilience there or from other projects we’ve done in the Bahamas or elsewhere, seeing those corals survive when things get tough is super encouraging. So more diverse, more resilient, and then more affordable corals at scale for the people.
Brian Bell (00:17:49): Just like a farmer would adapt their crops. If you went from, say, Europe to America or vice versa, you took New World back to Old World. you could adopt the crops over time through breeding techniques. That’s basically what you guys are doing. You’re breeding these corals that are much more resilient.
Sam Teicher (00:18:09): Yeah. We are always using native corals. So if we’re in the Bahamas, we’re using Bahamian corals. There are very respectable scientists talking about, well, do we need these super heat tolerant corals from the Red Sea in Australia in the Great Barrier Reef? If that happens, then we’ll get involved in that. We’re not pushing that kind of stuff forward, but we’re also at the level of how bad things are that those scientists who would have chased you out of the room with pitchforks for suggesting something like that a few years ago are now really having to contemplate pretty next level stuff. But yeah, we’re basically using selective breeding and toughening up these corals so that they can better survive.
Brian Bell (00:18:39): Remember my genetics 101, the peapods and all that stuff. That’s about the level of my science education. It’s like 100 level biology in college. Carol and A’s. Yeah. And then is there... kind of genetic engineering on the horizon, would you actually start kind of modifying the DNA of the coral to be even more resilient or is that even necessary?
Sam Teicher (00:19:00): So that research is being done. There’s some pretty heady stuff in the lab. There is CRISPR gene editing for corals to promote heat tolerance or disease tolerance or faster growth. There are people looking at how maybe you can sort of create these huge underwater pipes to bring colder water upwelling to the reef areas when it gets really hot deploying these coral air conditioning yeah water conditioning basically i recently became a dad so i’m here for the dad jokes biodegradable reflective slicks that can be deployed on top of the water to reflect sunlight. Again, from our perspective at Coral Vita, we’re not touching those yet. Maybe it’s the way of the future, but we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what unintended consequences there may be. So what’s exciting is that if it seems, oh yeah, you know what, CRISPR, we’re good. We’re not concerned about it. We have the ability to integrate that into our model without having to probably change too much up. And we know who those researchers are. But right now, we’re basically just accelerating the processes that reefs. Corals have the natural ability to adapt. It’s just getting so bad so quickly they can’t keep up.
Brian Bell (00:20:08): Yeah, I mean, tens of thousands of years from now, when humans have left to space and we’re all robots living around a Dyson sphere, around some star, around the whole galactic center, the reefs will come back. It might take millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years. But why not try to save them now and enjoy them if we can?
Sam Teicher (00:20:25): Yeah, you know, the adage you plant trees for the shade for your grandkids. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. It’s kind of like I mentioned at the beginning of the call, my dad’s work. I often describe myself as an optimistic realist. And he had to be when you’re talking about making peace in the Middle East. You can’t go into that type of job and just be a pure idealist because it’s going to blow up in your face. You have to acknowledge the cultures the history the pain all of these different things um the ego and accept that and work with it you also can’t be a cynic because how can you ever make peace if you don’t believe it’s possible and so we’ll face real real challenges and heartbreak and a lot when we’re looking at a lot of these things with coral reefs dying and also every reef we restore, every resilient coral we get out there, every tenth of a degree that gets averted makes a difference. And even if we won’t see the fruits of our labors for generations to come, those generations hopefully will get to benefit and prosper.
Brian Bell (00:21:19): Right. But it sounds like within a year or two on a project, you do see some stuff right away. I mean, like almost overnight, you said, but also the reef starts healing itself. And so if I’m a hotel and I’m putting in a billion dollar hotel somewhere, I might as well spend a little bit of money to put a reef out in front.
Sam Teicher (00:21:38): 100%. Yeah. And that’s the exciting thing for us also is just to go back to your VC hat. So earlier this year, we raised the Series A investment round. It was, as far as I know, the world’s first for a coral restoration company. It was led by Lucas Walton and Builders Vision. We’re generating millions of dollars in revenue and seeing that pick up year on year, signing contracts from the Middle East to the Caribbean public sector, private sector, tapping into conservation finance. The farms themselves, as we grow the corals and fulfill those contracts, are also tourism attractions. So people pay to visit the farm.
Brian Bell (00:22:09): Yeah, you can farm tours, right? Yeah, because you probably have actual fish in the farms, I would imagine, too, right?
Sam Teicher (00:22:15): Yeah. Yeah, so it’s like you can basically see a coral reef. You see us growing the corals, and then we also have these aquarium setups and touch tanks. It’s just like if a distillery, right? They’re making the whiskey and selling it, but the people are also paying to come to the tour. So we have that model too. So people coming from the hotels, from the cruise ships. We’ve got some award-winning farm experiences. And then we also do adopt a coral campaign. So whether it’s the holidays and someone loves what we’re doing, they can adopted individual coral, get a digital certificate. We also have restored with brands, nature positive companies. We’ve restored a Corona beer reef. We’ve worked with a Brazilian shoe company called Cariuma that did ocean themed shoes and money went towards restoration. So there’s lots of ways in which we can generate revenue with direct restoration. We’ve also developed technology. We use ourselves, but we license that tech out to other people in the space. The idea is how can we generate the revenue needed to do large scale impact. And we’re seeing the fruits of our labor in the sea as well as on the balance sheet.
Brian Bell (00:23:10): Yeah. So what’s next? What’s the five-year vision? You’ve raised an A and where do you want to be in five years?
Sam Teicher (00:23:17): Love to have operations and even more countries. So thus far, Bahamas, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and the Dutch Caribbean island of Ceiba. We actually have a farm that’s going to be opening up in Florida next year. The state of Florida gave us actually now two grants together with Florida Atlantic University to set up a facility in partnership with them. We’re going to be doing a new project in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. We got pipeline from the Maldives to Barbados to elsewhere. And then the tech I briefly referenced there before, actually this year was just recognized. It’s called Brain Coral as one of Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2025. So we basically are using computer vision, AI, and staff tools to rapidly collect and analyze key data for how we can basically grow corals more effectively and cost effectively. So how can that tech not just be involved in our work and it already is getting licensed out to other people, but basically underpin restoration all around the world. So from physical farms of our own to tech to partnerships, but really seeing sort of a, you know, probably a series B under our belt. But the proof points, the real work in the ocean and in the communities which we work, which is also a big part of our model through local hiring and workforce development and education. So there’s the social impacts out of what we do, too. But yeah, in five years, I’d love to basically be at that point where we could take that springboard. And then, I mean, ultimately, I hope we’re put out of business because reefs are fine. But every nation on Earth that has coral reefs can have large scale land based commercial coral farms. And we are doing the work that matters.
Brian Bell (00:24:47): What about the really extremely long view? Like if you look out 20 or 30 years, imagine you’ve been working on this for the rest of your life and you’re retiring. What are you proud of having accomplished? Imagine you do work on this exact problem for the next 30 years or whatever.
Sam Teicher (00:25:01): Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s always a fun question. Yeah. I mean, that basically we’ve proved that everything as far as our own impact in the reefs and also that like, yeah, the restoration economy and the ocean and ocean health is worth investing in. And it’s not just us and Coral Vita that’s successful and thriving, but there’s been this roadmap for a thousand other Coral Vitas and terrestrial and other marine ecosystems too that people are putting money into this we’re investing in the ecosystems in the local communities it’s showed that this is just it’s a win-win-win because it is i mean again if you can restore a reef that’s a living seawall that protects your roads and homes from storms it’s also tourism asset and boosts fish populations and is cheaper than the alternative it’s like kind of why not And, you know, maybe we’re also doing mangrove restoration and seagrass restoration and the tech is just doing all sorts of amazing things and we can bring in roboticists and all other forms of people from across the spectrum where it’s not just the marine scientists and people who care and do good and love the reefs, but we’re bringing in You know, coders and software engineers and, you know, AI specialists and, you know, systems thinkers and really creating this thriving system and restoration economy that takes care of the ecosystems that take care of us. And yeah, if that happens in 20, 30 years, I would definitely say job well.
Brian Bell (00:26:18): Amazing vision. Yeah, I wish I would have met you in the seed. Although, I don’t know, it’s kind of off thesis. But anyway, very cool. It’s very cool.
Sam Teicher (00:26:24): You know, it’s what’s been fun also about, you know, we’re definitely a different company. And like, yeah, we basically are building a market as we build a company, which has its challenges, but it’s also super exciting.
Brian Bell (00:26:33): Yeah.
Sam Teicher (00:26:33): We’ve got traditional VCs on the cap table. We’ve got the Lucas Waltons of the world and family offices, a couple of foundations who did PRIs. But we also have, you know, Angel, people that just love to scuba dive. Yeah. My probably, you know, one of the cool investors I’ll say is we have is Max and Erica Scherzer. And those who aren’t baseball fans, Max almost won the World Series again this year, but he’s a future Hall of Fame pitcher. But he and Erica love to scuba dive. And that was enough for them to get involved. And so the idea is really anyone anywhere can kind of support this.
Brian Bell (00:27:03): Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire questions. What’s the belief that you hold now in restoration or nature tech that you think most people in climate investing will flip in the next five years?
Sam Teicher (00:27:13): Nature and biodiversity is investable and important in its own right, whether or not there is a carbon sequestration angle.
Brian Bell (00:27:20): If you were to point to one unit economics or operational metric that everyone’s evaluating your business should track, what would it be and why?
Sam Teicher (00:27:26): For us at Coral Vita, I mean, what’s the cost per coral?
Brian Bell (00:27:28): Yeah, cost per coral, margin per coral, something like that. What’s been the most surprising pivot or rethink you’ve had to do at Coral Vita?
Sam Teicher (00:27:35): With a lot of exciting opportunities now and a huge community involved in it, I was not expecting to make the jump from the Caribbean to the Middle East so quickly, but seeing those communities really stepping up and investing in coral restoration has been incredible.
Brian Bell (00:27:47): They’re investing a lot in infrastructure right now in the Middle East. I mean, across the board.
Sam Teicher (00:27:51): And nature-based infrastructure. And not just in their own countries, but also supporting that work around the world. There’s now a GEACH-led initiative called Cordap, which Saudi Arabia seeded the funding for, which is a $200 million instrument to fund open source R&D for coral and mangrove and other forms of restoration.
Brian Bell (00:28:07): Who is a founder or company at the intersection of nature tech and commercial scale that you admire and why? Besides yourself, of course.
Sam Teicher (00:28:14): I got a lot of friends in this. I’d say one at a big level would be Von Chouinard in Patagonia, showing how businesses can do good and do well and also go outside of their own business and take care of nature. Another one would be Lisa Curtis, Kuli Kuli Foods. They take Moringa, which is a superfood work with Haitian smallholder farmers and women and make power bars and other foods out of them and does agroforestry work and good social impact work.
Brian Bell (00:28:40): What’s a bottleneck outside of your company, global or regional, that if you unlock it, it would lead to faster growth for you and faster restoration?
Sam Teicher (00:28:48): Education. We started off talking about the value of hotels and how it’s a no-brainer for some people. I’ve had the hotel owners and managers who absolutely get it. And the hotel owners have showed up and their $1,000 loafers on the beach and can’t fathom that anything past the high tide mark matters for them. So again, educating people of influence in finance, in industry, in government, in the media, that it’s not just a pretty rock, but it’s the life pending element for so many communities and the lifeblood of so many economies get through that roadblock i think a lot will change quickly
Brian Bell (00:29:22): if you were a vc fund or an investor evaluating nature tech companies what would you watch out for what are some red flags or yellow flags watch out for good and bad or just the yellow and red flags yeah you could take them both like what’s what’s where to lean in and where to go maybe lean out
Sam Teicher (00:29:37): Well, I think the people always matter. Who are you working with? I think, you know, what are the metrics they’re evaluating things by, right? They’re saying, look, we planted 100,000 trees or 10 million trees. That’s great. But were they the right trees? How many of them survived? What other metrics did you measure as far as like biodiversity changes in that forest? Did you positively or did you negatively impact the local communities in those areas? So I think, yeah, having that second, third level beyond just patting ourselves on the back and saying, you know, here’s the, there’s the headline story, but what was the real impact? I think is one of the most important questions that investors can dig into.
Brian Bell (00:30:11): Yeah. I’m kind of circling back to previous answers. What’s one thing you believe most clarity is missing on in the restoration economy today?
Brian Bell (00:30:18): What’s missing the most on clarity? That’s an interesting question.
Brian Bell (00:30:21): Yeah. What’s not clear? What’s a misconception you’d like to clear up if you could?
Sam Teicher (00:30:25): I think that any good project has to involve the local communities. They’re going to succeed. They’re much more likely to succeed. It’s the right thing to do. There’s knowledge that often these people have that far outweigh any just tech and not to mention coming in on a white stallion and thinking you know the way without involving local people is critical. I think too often that gets cast aside. So making sure that there’s clarity around the people as much as the planet with the tech and the solutions is essential and always needs to be kept top of mind.
Brian Bell (00:30:55): Well, any final words and how can folks find you if they want to get involved?
Sam Teicher (00:31:00): So on social media, we’re pretty standard at Coral Vita Reefs. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, www.coralvita.co, not .com. That’s an Eastern European cosmetics manufacturer. Go figure. And yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I would just say to everyone get get out in nature like obviously i hope you get the chance to see a reef whether you dive or snorkel or get on a glass bottom boat um it’s never too late to learn to do those things if you haven’t but also if you’re not able to get out there you know go into the woods or on a hike or your local park and i i just think that not only is it just good for the soul but i think the more time more people spend in nature the more easeful it is to support the work to take care of it and then recognizing oh shit we really do rely humanity relies on nature a lot more than nature relies on us everyone’s welcome to come visit our coral farm of course and i hope you get the chance to family out and come plant some coral with us thanks sam i’ve really learned a lot thanks for doing what you do appreciate it brian thanks for having me on thanks to everyone for listening.
