Keeping up with Climate Tech vol. 13

In the race to decarbonize agriculture, most climate startups begin in laboratories or on farmland. Birufinery begins in the ocean.

Azalea Ayuningtyas, SPH ‘13, CEO of Birufinery, did not arrive at seaweed through venture capital or a research grant. She arrived through people. 

“I’ve been working with coastal communities in the more rural, remote parts of Indonesia for the past 12 years,” she told the Harvard Technology Review. 

“I started to see how much the seaweed is contributing to local livelihoods in the area,” Ayuningtyas said. “But also how much potential is still not being unleashed from the tropical seaweed, especially in Indonesia.”

Yet the structure of the industry reveals a familiar pattern.

“So far, the seaweed in Indonesia is only sold as raw material,” Ayuningtyas said. “Meanwhile, all the innovation, all the new products are being developed or manufactured somewhere else in the world.”

Basically, smallholders grow and dry seaweed manually, sell it as a raw commodity, and watch as value accrues elsewhere. That imbalance became the core motivator behind Birufinery. 

“I feel that I’ve dedicated the first 10 years of my entrepreneurship journey working with women communities,” she said. “But now I see the next 10 years working more on seaweed because of its potential in economic, social, and environmental impact.”

This potential to help the environment comes from the fact that seaweed requires no freshwater, no arable land, and no synthetic fertilizers to grow. It absorbs nutrients from seawater and can support marine ecosystems when cultivated responsibly.

But Birufinery is not simply selling the sustainability story of seaweed farming. It is attempting to translate that biomass into downstream products that can reshape agriculture itself.

Turning Seaweed into Agricultural Infrastructure

The company’s first focus is seaweed-based biostimulants, which are designed to enhance plant growth, improve nutrient uptake, and increase resilience under stress. Unlike chemical fertilizers, which supply nutrients directly, biostimulants (such as Birufinery’s BiruLift) stimulate plant physiology (natural processes like root development, cell division, and enzyme activity). They do not directly supply nutrients, but rather improve the plant’s ability to absorb and utilize nutrients already available in the soil. 

Source: Birufinery

“We really believe biostimulants are part of the future of agriculture,” Ayuningtyas said. “Given the current climate progression, degraded land, and decreased productivity, we definitely see biostimulants as part of the norm in agriculture.”

Rebuilding a Dormant Coastal Industry

In several coastal regions where Birufinery operates, seaweed farming has declined or disappeared entirely. 

“We’re working with communities that used to do seaweed very manually,” Ayuningtyas said. “Because of the manual practices and lack of innovation, they had failures, so they stopped doing seaweed in the past 15 years.”

Reviving that industry required both technical intervention and trust. 

“Many of them already know how to work on seaweed, and they’ve experienced increased wealth because of seaweed,” she said. “So they are very grateful, very excited to work with seaweed through our innovative manner of farming.”

The Power of Vertical Integration

What distinguishes Birufinery is not just the product but the architecture around it. The company chose early on not to operate solely as a processor purchasing seaweed from traders. Instead, it built vertically. 

That decision begins at the very first biological input: the seaweed seedling. 

“The main necessary input is the seedling,” Ayuningtyas explained. “Ensuring we provide a premium-quality seedling that’s available all year round in our nursery allows farmers to grow with us.” 

In tropical seaweed farming, quality variability at the seed stage cascades downstream. Poor genetics or inconsistent propagation reduce yield, lower carrageenan content, and ultimately weaken the efficacy of any derivative product. By operating nurseries and controlling seed stock, Birufinery standardizes the biological foundation of its supply chain.

From there, the company works directly with smallholders, many of whom, Ayuningtyas said, cultivate less than one hectare, sometimes only a third.

Birufinery adapted the Indonesian “inti plasma” system of farming in its vertically-integrated model as well (where large agricultural companies support smallholder farmers by providing land, training, and resources in exchange for exclusive rights to buy their produce). The company provides inputs, seedlings, technical training, sometimes equipment, and guarantees offtake. 

“We off-take all the farmers’ harvest, while they keep their land, and we can do centralized post-harvest processing,” Ayuningtyas said. 

That centralization is crucial. Drying, cleaning, and grading seaweed affect moisture content, contamination levels, and bioactive compound concentration. Variability at this stage would directly influence the consistency of Birufinery’s biostimulant.

Vertical integration also protects the company from what Ayuningtyas calls the “price war” trap. 

“Indonesia already has carrageenan [a carbohydrate extracted from seaweed] processors that struggle because they must compete with larger Chinese factories for raw seaweed,” she said. “If we do not have direct access to the farmers, we will enter into a price war with all these other traders.”

Controlling upstream supply shields Birufinery from volatile commodity dynamics and ensures it is not squeezed by larger buyers. 

Governing an Open Ocean

Birufinery’s vertical model extends beyond procurement security. It allows Birufinery to shape environmental practices at the farming level. Unlike land-based agriculture, marine farming exists in open-access ecosystems.

“It’s an ocean. It’s open,” Ayuningtyas said. “Everybody can come in. Everybody can do illegal fishing or toxic practices.”

To mitigate that risk, Birufinery fosters collective ownership of marine farming areas. The company supports marine patrols and educates communities about coral reef, mangrove, and seagrass preservation. 

“We can only do this if we have direct relationships with the coastal community,” she said. “Otherwise, we cannot control the environmental impact.”

Women, Trust, and Community Balance

The company’s social lens to empower women in these coastal communities is equally deliberate. Seaweed farming in Indonesia is often evenly split between men and women. 

“It’s almost 50-50,” Ayuningtyas said. “Male farmers and female farmers work hand in hand. But working also with women seaweed farmers helps balance the community,” she said. “We can use a softer approach in our outreach to them; it’s not purely business as with men.”

The Hard Lesson on Adoption

On the downstream side, Birufinery’s early customers include plantation owners seeking higher yields and reduced fertilizer dependency. Yet one of the company’s most surprising lessons emerged not from agronomy, but from organizational dynamics.

“We thought as long as we make the yield better, people will buy it,” Ayuningtyas admitted. 

Data showed improved productivity and profitability. Plantation owners were convinced. But adoption lagged.

“It’s actually very important to get buy-in from the plantation managers and even the plantation workers,” she said. “If it’s difficult to apply, maybe they’re not very excited to adopt it.” When owners asked for feedback, frontline workers could quietly downplay performance.

The realization reframed Birufinery’s go-to-market strategy. 

“We need to understand not just the owners’ metrics, but also what’s important for the people who are actually applying the product,” she said. In this case, climate technology required incentive alignment across every human layer of the system.

Science as a Strategic Advantage

Ayuningtyas credits her scientific training for helping her navigate that complexity. After studying epidemiology and public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she developed a comfort with data-driven decision-making. 

“I’ve always emphasized data and evidence-backed product strategy,” she said. “It’s never intimidating to read scientific papers and understand what our chief of science is talking about.”

Her founding team reflects that interdisciplinarity: a PhD in biorefinery science, a supply chain and community specialist, a former McKinsey consultant, and Ayuningtyas herself acting as integrator. 

“Whenever we speak, we each represent a different perspective,” she said. “My job as CEO is bridging it together. Without me, sometimes they cannot understand each other because they have different perspectives.”

Beyond Biostimulants: Building a True Biorefinery

Looking forward, Birufinery’s ambitions extend beyond agriculture. The company ultimately aims to extract multiple high-value outputs from the same tropical seaweed biomass. 

“Ideally, beyond five years, we become a bio refinery company, hence the name Birufinery,” Ayuningtyas said. “Not only agriculture, but also animal feed additives, cosmetic ingredients, and pharma.”

The vision is not incremental substitution but systemic repositioning of tropical seaweed as a strategic feedstock. 

“By our approach, using tropical seaweed, we can make biostimulants much more affordable and scalable compared to current products that use cold-water seaweed,” she said, noting that cold-water varieties are often wild-harvested and seasonal.

Success in the next two to five years, she says, will look like deep penetration of seaweed-based biostimulants across Southeast Asia and other developing regions, markets where cost and scalability are decisive.

If the twentieth century’s agricultural revolution was built on petrochemicals, Birufinery is betting that the twenty-first will be built on biology, and that some of its most powerful inputs are already growing offshore, waiting not to be harvested, but refined.