Key takeaways:
- Shift has awarded its second annual $25,000 Impact Grant to PhyCo, a marine biotech company turning seaweed into a compostable plastic alternative
- PhyCo Technologies' flagship product is a home-compostable, earth-digestible bioplastic built for agricultural mulch films and crop support materials
- The company targets the 70% of plastic use that happens behind the scenes in agriculture, not on grocery shelves
- Co-founded by marine biologist Ranah Chavoshi and biotechnologist Stacey Goldberg, PhyCo is built in partnership with Indigenous Nations and coastal communities
- PhyCo has already earned recognition from Ocean Wise, BMO's Generation Regen Challenge, and the Beaver's Den People's Choice Award, alongside $500,000 in non-dilutive funding
- The company just completed the first phase of an international pilot in Portugal, a major step toward commercialization
- The grant follows the same unrestricted funding model that helped 2025 winner FireSwarm Solutions scale toward deployment
Reimagining doesn't pause when the industry does
Our theme for the 2026 Shift Impact Grant is Reimagining, not slowing down to protect the planet, and not building fast and figuring out the footprint later, but treating sustainability as something you design with from the start.
That belief matters more right now, not less. A lot of the tech industry is quietly stepping back from the climate commitments it made a few years ago. Budgets get reallocated, sustainability teams get smaller, and the language softens from "commitment" to "aspiration." The problems those commitments were meant to address haven't gotten smaller in the meantime.
That's the gap the Shift Impact Grant is built to sit in. Unrestricted funding for people doing the unglamorous, structural work of rebuilding systems that were never designed with the planet in mind. This year, that's PhyCo Technologies.
Meet PhyCo
PhyCo is a female-founded marine biotechnology company developing home-compostable biomaterials from cultivated and invasive seaweed, built to replace petroleum-based agricultural plastics. Their flagship product is an earth-digestible bioplastic that can be manufactured into mulch films and crop support materials, the kind of thing farmers wrap around seedlings every season, designed to break down safely in soil without leaving microplastic residue behind.
The idea for PhyCo started with a colossal amount of plastic waste that ends up in our oceans. In 2016, Chavoshi, a marine biologist, was diving near Sipadan, Malaysia, one of the world's best-known scuba destinations, and photographed severe plastic pollution along the coastline, a scene far removed from the pristine reef she'd expected to find. The image stayed with her. Years later, during a COVID-19 lab shutdown that put her graduate research on hold, she began experimenting with seaweed-based plastic at her kitchen table.
That kitchen-table prototype became PhyCo, co-founded in 2022 by Chavoshi and biotechnologist Dr. Stacey Goldberg, equal partners from day one. Goldberg brings 25 years of experience in marine biology and microbiology, and as PhyCo's chief scientific officer, she developed the company's biorefinery process and has led the work of scaling it from benchtop to production-scale pilots, including ensuring the material meets regulatory testing standards. Enzyme technology and green chemistry play a key role in PhyCo's biorefinery process, breaking the seaweed down into extracts that are compounded into pellets and converted into the finished plastic. The material biodegrades fully on its own once it's done its job, without needing added technology to help it break down, avoiding the fragmentation that so much of what gets labeled biodegradable actually leaves behind.
Why seaweed, why now?
The scale of the problem PhyCo is working against is easy to underestimate. Most plastic use isn't the packaging on a grocery shelf, it's the plastic wrapped around crops. Plastic mulch films alone cover more than 25 million acres of farmland worldwide and account for roughly half the mass of all agricultural plastics in use, contributing an estimated 6.7 million tons of nonbiodegradable material into the soil every year. Once that film has been spread across a field for a season, it's notoriously difficult to collect and recycle, which is exactly the gap PhyCo is building for. PhyCo's own research points to this as a $100 billion problem, one that's deeply embedded in the systems that bring food from farm to table. Once collected, that plastic waste is often burned or buried on-site by farmers, or sent to a landfill or waste management facility, but most of it never gets the visibility that packaging waste does simply because consumers never see it.
It's also a moment when the broader case for seaweed as a serious material category is building fast. The global commercial seaweed market was valued at roughly $72.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to more than double by 2035, driven in part by seaweed's role in carbon sequestration and the broader blue economy. PhyCo is part of a small but growing field of bioplastics research exploring seaweed-based plastics and biomass plastics as viable alternatives to petroleum-based materials, and one of the only companies in Canada aspiring to build a fully petroleum-free version of it. They're also exploring invasive sargassum and other invasive seaweed species as future feedstock, having already tested three species that all work in their biorefinery process, a rare case where sourcing the raw material and reducing an ecological harm point in the same direction.
Why we're proud to support PhyCo
Last year's grant went to FireSwarm Solutions. Since then, the unrestricted funding has helped the team advance toward NATO's DIANA 2026 Challenge Programme and earn recognition from Foresight Canada as one of the country's leading climate technology companies. What stood out wasn't the size of the grant, it was what a team can do when they already have the technology and the drive.
PhyCo has shown that same pattern. In three years, the team has earned more than a dozen awards and grants, including recognition from Ocean Wise's Innovator Lab, a finalist spot and People's Choice Award at Beaver's Den, and a finalist placement in BMO's Generation Regen Challenge, alongside $500,000 in non-dilutive funding to date. That's a team that turns support into momentum, which is exactly what this grant is meant to compound.
Ranah and Stacey are tackling a massive environmental problem that most of us never see," said Neil Henderson, CEO of Shift. "The Shift Impact Grant is designed to give founders the flexibility to put funding where it can make the greatest difference. For PhyCo, that means introducing a promising seaweed-based plastic alternative to the industries that need it.
What's next for PhyCo
PhyCo recently completed the first phase of its first production-scale pilot outside Canada, testing its process for the first time with a partner team in Portugal. The pilot showed the process can work at a larger scale, the team improved its yields, reduced production costs, and learned how to adapt the process for new regions. With the Impact Grant, the team plans to build on those results as it moves closer to commercialization, while deepening the community partnerships that shape how the product gets made in the first place.
That partnership model isn't hypothetical. Nova Scotia's Ecology Action Centre, a nonprofit supporting small-scale coastal seaweed farmers, is growing kelp for PhyCo this year through a dedicated farming hub, with the long-term goal of local farmers eventually filling PhyCo's orders directly. It's a working example of what it looks like to build a supply chain with coastal and Indigenous communities instead of around them.
Most people think food-related plastic starts at the grocery store, but much of it is used on farms long before food reaches the shelf," said Ranah Chavoshi, co-founder and CEO of PhyCo. "We started PhyCo to develop a soil-biodegradable, non-toxic and petroleum-free alternative from seaweed, working in partnership with Indigenous communities. The Shift Impact Grant will help us move that work beyond the lab and get a practical, compostable solution closer to the farmers who need it.
A program worth repeating
The most convincing example of bioplastic innovation isn't the one built for a press release, it's the one built to actually replace what farmers are already using, at the scale agriculture actually operates at. That's the bet the Shift Impact Grant is designed to make: put unrestricted funding behind people solving structural problems, and get out of their way.
We're proud to be a small part of PhyCo's story, the same way we were with FireSwarm the year before. Reimagining isn't a campaign that wraps up after one blog post or one grant cycle. It's the standard we're holding ourselves to, alongside the Carbon Meter and everything else under the values of Shift Gives.
If you're building something that deserves this kind of runway, or you know someone who is, keep an eye on shift.com/impact-grant for next year's applications to open.
