Top 6 at Singapore’s inaugural Blue Catalyst
Chosen from 130+ applicants across 37 countries, then among the six selected at Demo Day.
May 2026 · Hatch Blue
The Blue Catalyst Challenge is the inaugural edition of a global search for technologies that can protect and restore blue carbon ecosystems — mangroves, seagrass, tidal marshes. It drew more than 130 applications from 37 countries. Ten ventures were chosen for a two-week accelerator in Singapore, run by WWF-Singapore and Hatch Blue with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board; six were selected at Demo Day on 22 May to carry the work forward — Straatos among them.
What we brought to the stage
Our pitch made one argument: high-integrity blue carbon is, before anything else, a data problem. Mangroves are among the hardest ecosystems on earth to monitor — flooded twice a day, much of the carbon below the waterline, sites reachable only by boat and on foot. You cannot audit your way out of that. The evidence has to be captured at the source, the first time, by the people already on the water.
From the stage to the tide
Demo Day is a milestone, not a finish line. Everything we sharpened in Singapore feeds directly into our mangrove restoration work in Senegal — the same hard tides, the same need to prove a small, community-led project to the same standard as a large one.
