Along Indonesia’s coasts, smallholder farmers tie seaweed to lines strung across shallow water. A few hundred kilometres inland, other smallholders watch El Niño bake their rice paddies.
Jakarta-based AquaBloom wants the first group’s harvest to rescue the second group’s yields, and it now has fresh capital to test whether that idea scales.
The agri-biotech startup has raised an undisclosed seed round led by Spiral Ventures, with participation from Potato Impact Partners (PIP), Archipelago VC and several angels.
The money will go into expanding manufacturing capacity, R&D and field trials, and distribution across Indonesia.
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Founded in 2024 by CEO Michelle Arsjad, AquaBloom makes seaweed-based biostimulants for crops and feed additives for livestock. It previously raised from Altrui Investment Management, among others.
Indonesia ships the seaweed, and the value with it
Indonesia is the world’s second-largest seaweed producer after China, yet most of the crop leaves as a low-priced commodity. According to UNCTAD, close to two-thirds of the country’s seaweed exports are raw, which caps how much value stays at home.
Between January and October 2025, Indonesia exported US$264.6 million worth of seaweed, mostly dried seaweed and carrageenan, with China the dominant buyer at US$183.6 million.
Jakarta knows this. In October, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan urged faster seaweed downstreaming so the commodity is turned into value-added products rather than shipped out raw. AquaBloom is pitching itself as one small answer to that policy itch.
Biostimulants are not fertilisers. Rather than feeding the plant directly, they help it absorb nutrients more efficiently and cope with stresses such as heat and drought. The promise for farmers is better yields with less synthetic fertiliser, which matters when input costs swing and subsidised supply is unreliable.
A pitch built on yield, and on El Niño
The target customer is the smallholder who has been squeezed from both sides: rising costs and an increasingly erratic climate. Other startups have spotted the same pressure point, from low-emission rice farming to precision agri-drones.
“Smallholder farmers need and deserve tools designed for the realities they face, especially as the climate makes farming less predictable,” Arsjad says. “The seaweed we use is grown by smallholder farmers along Indonesia’s coasts. I find it beautiful that smallholder farmers at sea can help smallholder farmers on land grow stronger crops.”
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The company says its products have been validated on almost 30 crops across more than 40 field trials in Indonesia, with yield improvements of 20 to 30 per cent. It points to rice plots hit by El Niño this September, where treated paddies showed taller shoots and more tillering than adjacent control plots.
Those are striking numbers although AquaBloom has not share the details such as who ran each trial, across how many seasons, or how results varied by crop. Yield gains in a drought year can look very different in a normal one.
Why the investors signed the cheque
Spiral Ventures’s Irawan Ganda, Partner and Head of Southeast Asia, points to the regulatory groundwork: three products already registered for sale in Indonesia and third-party trials backing the yield claims. He also highlights a team whose product people came out of Bayer, Syngenta and Corteva. Spiral plans to open doors to Japanese and regional agriculture groups.
PIP’s Investment Lead Tessa Charupatanapongse cites the product’s range across almost 30 crops and the distribution networks already reaching smallholders.
The most telling detail comes from Archipelago VC’s Principal Olivier Lentze. His firm first met Arsjad in 2025, before AquaBloom had earned a single rupiah. Over the following 18 months, he says, the team landed larger-volume clients, drove farmer adoption and increased production while holding prices accessible. This means AquaBloom’s commercial track record is roughly a year and a half old.
Imported incumbents, and the hard part of selling to smallholders
AquaBloom’s main argument against rivals is provenance. Established seaweed biostimulant brands sold in Indonesia are largely imported. Globally, Canada’s Acadian Plant Health and South Africa’s Kelpak have built businesses on cold-water kelp, while India’s Sea6 Energy works with tropical seaweed. The agrochemical majors also run biologicals divisions. A local product made from local seaweed, tuned to local crops, could undercut imports on price, but the incumbents have deeper pockets and longer trial histories.
The tougher fight may be distribution. Indonesia’s first generation of agritech learned that reaching smallholders is expensive and extending credit to them can be fatal. Farmers also have to be persuaded to pay for an input whose benefits are less visible than fertiliser’s, in a sector already battling a youth exodus from farming.
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Some in the sector argue that the farmer need not always be the one paying, with offtakers, retailers or corporates footing part of the bill. AquaBloom’s plan to grow through retail partners, and Spiral’s push towards regional agriculture groups, hint at that route. A strategic buyer may also be the likeliest exit, since Southeast Asian agritech is arguably better built for acquisitions than IPOs.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, AquaBloom plans to scale production and widen retail distribution. Investors in Southeast Asian climate tech have heard plenty of impact stories. The one that matters here will be told by a shallot grower deciding whether to buy a second bottle.
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