Global Blue Economy Trends

Key Findings

• In H1 2023, Series A funding in the Blue Economy increased 31% compared to H1 2021.
• The median Blue Economy Series A deal has increased 40% from H1 2021 to H1 2023.
• In 2022, Europe surpassed North America in its share of Blue Economy Series A funding.

In 2022, Startup Genome released its first Blue Economy report, which presented insights into a small but growing sub-sector. Blue Economy funding levels have improved, even as most tech startup sub-sectors have seen significant declines since the heights of 2021.  

In H1 2023, Series A funding in the Blue Economy increased 31% compared to H1 2021. Series A growth is benchmarked against peer sub-sectors, with H1 2021 funding indexed to 1 to show the Blue Economy’s relative overperformance over the past two years.

Encouragingly, the median Blue Economy Series A deal has increased 40% from H1 2021 to H1 2023. This data has been annualized to incorporate enough Blue Economy deals to be statistically comparable to other sub-sectors. The growth of Series A funding, in conjunction with increasing deal medians, indicates that the number of high-potential Blue Economy startups is increasing and that investors are becoming increasingly optimistic about this emerging sub-sector. 

The data below has been annualized to incorporate more data points for comparative Blue Economy Series A deals.

Regionally, we see Blue Economy Series A trends reflecting similar developments to Cleantech — Europe has surpassed North America in its share of all Blue Economy Series A funding in 2022, probably driven by the growth in Cleantech funding in Europe, a sub-sector that overlaps significantly with Blue Economy. 

However, other regions still remain very small relative to Europe and North America. Surprisingly, despite Singapore being ranked the #1 Blue Economy ecosystem in both 2022 and 2023, Asia has not surpassed 20% of the sub-sector’s Series A funding. This indicates that the strong Blue Economy innovation emerging from Singapore has yet to diffuse across the continent.