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Tidal Vision Products
Craig Kasberg founded Tidal Vision Products in 2015, scaling crab-shell chitosan to treat over 1 billion gallons of water daily from Bellingham, WA.
Tidal Vision Products
Tidal Vision Products was founded in 2015 by Craig Kasberg, a commercial fisherman who spent years discarding millions of pounds of crab shells before engineering a way to convert them into chitosan, a biopolymer with industrial applications in water treatment, textile manufacturing, and agriculture. The company emerged from Bellingham, Washington, with a thesis that shellfish waste could replace petrochemical-based chemistries at scale. The firm operates as an industrial biotechnology manufacturer, deploying proprietary extraction technology to produce chitosan at price points that compete directly with synthetic polymers. Its deployment covers three verticals: Tidal Clear for stormwater and industrial wastewater treatment, Tidal Tex for antimicrobial textile finishes, and Tidal Grow for crop yield enhancement. Publicly disclosed customers include municipal water districts, mining operations, and textile mills. The geographic footprint spans North America, with production facilities on the West Coast and distribution agreements extending into Southeast Asia and Europe. Kasberg has scaled the company through multiple venture rounds, attracting both impact investors and strategic industrials. In 2022, the firm closed a $16 million Series B led by Milliken & Company, signaling that a major synthetic polymer producer saw defensible demand for bio-based alternatives. Tidal Vision operates an adjacent structure in Cascade Bioproducts, its manufacturing arm, which handles raw material processing from fisheries across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The structural differentiator is sourcing: Tidal Vision is the only commercial-scale chitosan producer backward-integrated into fishery supply chains. It does not buy chitosan on the spot market and reprocess it; it owns the extraction chemistry from catch to finished product, giving it a cost structure no chemical distributor can replicate without owning a fleet relationship.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
2015
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
Bellingham
Corporate office
Bellingham, WA, United States
Principals
Craig Kasberg
Founder & CEO
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
What problem does Tidal Vision solve that existing chemical companies could not?
Chitosan has been available as a flocculant for decades but was never adopted at scale because suppliers sold it as an expensive specialty chemical derived from inconsistent foreign shrimp shell supply chains. Tidal Vision vertically integrated into North Pacific crab fisheries — a waste stream Kasberg personally managed as a boat captain — and developed a proprietary continuous-flow extraction method that drops the production cost below petrochemical alternatives. This shifted chitosan from a niche lab chemical to an industrial commodity.
How defensible is Tidal Vision's raw material supply chain?
The company sources primarily from Alaskan crab processors who would otherwise pay to landfill shells. Those relationships are sticky because Tidal Vision's logistics infrastructure sits at the processing docks, absorbing a waste liability that no other buyer has built the physical plant to accept. Replicating that network would require a competitor to site facilities at multiple remote ports and secure multi-year offtake agreements with processors who already have a working solution.
Does Tidal Vision compete with synthetic polymer giants or partner with them?
Both. Milliken & Company, a major synthetic polymer manufacturer, led Tidal Vision's 2022 Series B, which suggests the incumbent sees the chitosan line as a complementary bio-based offering rather than a threat to its core business. Municipal water treatment contracts put Tidal Vision in direct competition with polyacrylamide producers, but in textiles Milliken appears to be positioning Tidal Tex as a premium natural finish within its own supply relationships.
What is the company's manufacturing footprint?
Primary extraction occurs at Tidal Vision's Bellingham, Washington facility, with an additional manufacturing arm, Cascade Bioproducts, handling raw material preprocessing closer to fishery landing sites. The company has not publicly disclosed full production capacity, but its claim of treating over one billion gallons of water daily implies industrial-scale continuous production rather than batch processing.
Is Tidal Vision still a venture-backed startup or does it operate as a commercial-stage company?
The 2022 Series B and the presence of a strategic corporate lead investor indicate the company has moved beyond proof-of-concept. It services paying municipal and industrial contracts across three distinct verticals — water, textiles, agriculture — which is revenue structure more typical of a growth-stage industrial company than a pre-revenue biotech startup. It has not disclosed reaching profitability.
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