Seafields was born in 2021, but its origins trace back slightly further to when founder Sebastian Stephens was investigating sustainable fuel options for island nations , specifically bioethanol, and came across a podcast in which oceanographer Victor Smetacek and Dr. Franziska Elmer spoke about the growing problem of Sargassum and its latent potential. It was this podcast that shifted Sebastian’s thinking: what had been treated as a nuisance could be recast as one of the planet’s most powerful climate solutions. 

Sebastian gathered a team of co-founders, including people with marine science, engineering, ocean ecology, climate finance, operational experience, and sustainability backgrounds, to build a company grounded in both scientific rigour and scalable business design. The company emerged against the backdrop of the climate crisis, worsening sargassum influxes across the Atlantic, and growing industrial demand for low-carbon alternatives to land-based feedstocks.