how it started
Cerberus was born a few years ago with a clear mission:
To make seaweed farming accessible through innovative cultivation systems. We wanted to drive the future of the blue economy by helping farmers grow algae more efficiently.
We set out to rethink everything — especially the plastic lines and ropes traditionally used in seaweed farming. We tested it all: ceramics, metals, sponges — you name it. We iterated and designed ways to integrate growth material into a central buoy. Progress was slow, but we kept getting closer to our vision of an ecologically-built seaweed system.
Then came the real-world tests. The sea is a relentless force, and despite our best efforts, nothing we tried survived.
But we didn’t give up. We still believe in alternative algae farming. Today, we work with recyclable and durable materials while evaluating our systems.
one of our very first prototypes of a cultivation buoy with interchangeable "wings"
concept to product
Cerberus Seaweed Systems values the combination of hands-on work and conceptual innovation. Next to substrate testing, prototype building and getting the system ready for market, we challenge the status quo with our vision of an accessible system for maritime cultivation.
The concept "Cerberus - the seaweed project" got awarded with the German Sustainability Prize 2022, the if Design Talent Award 2022 (best of the year) and the C-IDEA Award in 2022, among others. This motivated us to found Cerberus Seaweed Systems and to explore the world of maritime algae cultivation further.
We spent months exploring Europe’s algae industry, meeting incredible people and passionate enthusiasts. The more we learned, the clearer it became:
Algae is awesome — but Europe doesn’t know it yet.
We kept hearing the same thing:
“We can’t scale.”
“We’re waiting for demand to catch up.”
The reality?
Farms are ready to grow more algae. But demand isn’t there.
It hit us hard. We’d built a system to make algae farming better — but who needs a farming system if people don’t even know why they should care about algae?
For a moment, we wondered:
Did we make a mistake?
installing our first sea worthy prototype to test the durability under real conditions
