Innovasea Brand Guidelines: AquaPods, SeaStations & the Vemco Fish-Tracking Line

A Maine dome and a Washington spar.

Innovasea began as a merger of two American makers of offshore fish pens. Aquaculture North America reported in February 2015 that Ocean Farm Technologies of Maine and OceanSpar of Washington State had signed a merger in January to form a new company, then written InnovaSea Systems, to supply open-ocean fish-farming technology, consulting and services.

The two partners brought different designs. Ocean Farm Technologies was founded in 2005 by Steve Page, a veteran of Maine’s salmon-farming industry, who designed its signature AquaPod, a geodesic, dome-shaped pen meant to sit in exposed offshore water; the magazine said AquaPods had been shipped since 2008 to customers in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama and South Korea, with smaller MicroPods demonstrated in Ecuador and Indonesia. OceanSpar was founded in 1988 on Bainbridge Island by Gary Loverich and Tom Croker, who had been making trawl gear for the Bering Sea fleet through an earlier company, Net Systems. Loverich developed the SeaStation pen in 1993, and the magazine said SeaStations had been tested in Spain, Portugal, Korea, Panama, Mexico and the United States.

Both companies worked with Open Blue, a fish farm off Panama, whose founder told the magazine that the merger combined similar technologies and concepts in one company. The magazine presented the deal as a first step towards what the partners hoped would be a next generation of open-ocean mariculture technology, with further details to follow once customers of both companies had been briefed.

From pens to pings.

The company soon grew beyond net pens. On 30 November 2017, in an announcement datelined Boston, InnovaSea said it had acquired Amirix Systems of Canada, the parent of Vemco and Realtime Aquaculture, both in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and of HTI-Vemco in Seattle. Vemco and HTI-Vemco made acoustic tags and receivers that researchers use to track fish in the wild; Realtime Aquaculture made wireless sensors for monitoring conditions on fish farms. Both lines, the announcement said, used acoustic signals to send data underwater. Amirix, it added, had begun in 1981 as a microelectronics research and development centre, and its chief executive spoke of the company’s production facility in Nova Scotia.

A second purchase followed. A press release of 1 March 2019 said Innovasea had completed the acquisition of the Norwegian company Nortek Akvakultur, which was combined with Realtime Aquaculture into a new instrumentation team; Nortek Akvakultur AS took the name Innovasea Akvakultur AS, and the release carried datelines from Boston, Halifax and Bergen. It described Nortek AS, the parent, as a Norwegian technology company focused on measuring ocean currents and waves, based outside Oslo. The plan, the release said, was to let customers add Realtime Aquaculture’s wireless sensors to existing Nortek Akvakultur installations as a hardware upgrade in mid-2019, with full integration of the two product lines expected by 2020.

Today Innovasea sells in two broad fields. For fish farms its website lists submersible net pens, waterborne feeding, wireless environmental sensors, cameras and biomass estimation, farm-management software, and design and consulting services for land-based farms. For researchers it lists the NexTrak acoustic telemetry system, acoustic tags, receivers and hydrophones, and its Fathom software. In an October 2025 announcement the company tied its wireless aquaMeasure environmental sensors to the same underlying acoustic technology as its fish-tracking line.

Its website names managing directors for Norway, Chile and the Mediterranean, each with its own regional page.

How aquaculture suppliers present themselves.

Aquaculture suppliers sell to fish farmers and other professional buyers, and their brands are shaped by the places their equipment works. The pictures that recur across the sector are aerial views of circular pens floating in a fjord or a sheltered bay, rows of plastic rings linked by mooring lines, and a feed barge moored beside them. Seen from above, a fish farm is a set of simple shapes on dark water, and many suppliers lean on that geometry in their photography and graphics.

Closer in, the imagery turns to working detail: net cages lifted at the edge of a pen, feed pellets and silos, hoses carrying feed out to the rings, cameras and sensors lowered into the water, and divers or remotely operated vehicles inspecting nets below the surface. Land-based farming adds a different picture, of tanks, pipes and filtration halls indoors. Service boats and workboats appear in many catalogues, because service and maintenance at sea are part of what these suppliers sell.

In many identities colour follows the setting: blues, greens and greys stand in for sea and coast, and a brighter accent, often orange or yellow, echoes the buoys, floats and safety gear that make equipment visible on the water. Type is often a plain sans, chosen for technical documents, product sheets and dashboards as much as for advertising.

Trade fairs remain an important stage for these brands. Aqua Nor in Trondheim and conferences such as AquaVision bring farmers, feed makers and equipment suppliers together, and stands there carry the same mix of pen models, barge cut-aways and screens of feeding software. The guides in this series look at how individual suppliers present themselves within that shared visual language.

An impact fund owner and a 2026 refresh.

Innovasea has had one main owner for most of its life. In the November 2017 announcement, the chief executive of Cuna del Mar, described as a US-based impact investment fund, was quoted as head of the majority owner of InnovaSea. The company’s own website now says it belongs to the Cuna del Mar portfolio, a group of organisations working on open-ocean aquaculture, and that Cuna del Mar was founded by Alumbra Innovations, or iAlumbra. In October 2025 Innovasea named Mark Jollymore, the former head of Amirix who had been interim chief executive since May, as its permanent chief executive; a managing partner of Cuna del Mar was named as chairman of its board.

The identity was updated in March 2026. Innovasea said the refresh brought “a reimagined version of its previous logo and a new color scheme,” meant to reflect its ties to iAlumbra and Cuna del Mar, and that its website had been reorganised around submersible pens for open-ocean farms, design and consulting for land-based farms, and its acoustic telemetry products. The same announcement said the leadership team is based in North America and oversees more than 250 employees, and that the chief executive works from the company’s Halifax office.

The spelling has changed too: early reports and the 2017 announcement wrote InnovaSea with a capital S, while the company now writes Innovasea.

For a design guide, Innovasea shows how one name can stretch over two quite different customers, fish farmers and fisheries scientists, held together by underwater hardware and data. Compare AKVA group and ScaleAQ, two Norwegian makers of fish-farming equipment. For this guide we use an ocean blue, a teal and a pale spray with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Innovasea’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.