With ocean fisheries increasingly failing to meet global demands—about 85 percent of them are classified as depleted or worse, according to the World Bank—the future of the food supply will depend on fish farming. But aquaculture has a big limitation: Fish eggs have a short shelf life. Norway’s salmon farms meet some 40 percent of global demand for the species, for instance, but can harvest eggs only during the few months of spawning season. How do you boost production the rest of the year? That’s the problem being solved by Cryoocyte, a startup that is developing technology to cool the eggs and make them available on demand. “We’re basically turning fish eggs into seeds you can plant anytime and use whenever you want,” says CEO Dmitry Kozachenok (MBA 2013).

Since cofounding Cryoocyte in his first semester at HBS, Kozachenok has recruited a team of four experts in fields such as biochemistry, molecular biology, and electrical engineering from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts. Just three years into developing a proprietary freezing process, they’ve already made a serious splash in aquaculture. The company was named a finalist in MIT’s $100K business plan competition, won Fish 2.0’s $25,000 second prize, and earned a $100,000 FOUNDER.org grant. And all the attention—as well as lessons Kozachenok learned in HBS professor Vicki Sato’s Commercializing Science course and from the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at the Harvard i-lab—has given Cryoocyte the funding and fresh ideas needed to hone its technology in the field. To gather viable eggs for testing, the company’s Allston-based team has had to follow spawning season, from Panama to the Patagonia Mountains of Chile and soon to northern Europe, along the way hacking together a transportable lab that’s immune to the elements. “Weather conditions, power outages—they don’t matter to us anymore,” Kozachenok says.

What does matter is advancing aquaculture, an enterprise that, when carried out poorly, can lead to serious coastal pollution and other environmental headaches. Part of the problem, Kozachenok says, is the field’s relative youth: “Commercial fish farming only started in the 1980s. It hasn’t had time to mature into a solid, sustainable industry.” By increasing supply consistency, though, Cryoocyte aims to give farmers just what they need to push their business into the future.

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