Building OceanIQ: How AI and “Blue Mind” Are Reshaping Marine Protection with Vincent Kneefel

1. Firstly, please introduce yourself — your name, your organisation, and your role.

Vincent Kneefel: I’m Vincent Kneefel, co-founder and CEO of Vital Ocean. We’re an ocean intelligence company: we build AI technology that helps governments, businesses, and conservation organisations make faster, smarter decisions about the ocean.

I’m also a PADI dive instructor and award-winning underwater photographer. I’ve spent the last twenty years with my head underwater in one way or another, trying to capture the beauty and importance of the ocean, most recently through The Ocean Story, documenting iconic marine megafauna, which is endorsed by the UN Ocean Decade. These days I’m based in Barbados.

2. You’ve gone from Rotterdam to Barbados and built Vital Ocean around protecting the ocean. What first made ocean conservation personal to you?

Vincent Kneefel: Scuba diving did it. Growing up in the Netherlands, you have this complicated relationship with the sea; it’s something you hold back with dikes, and there is very limited visibility—not something you fall in love with. Then I learned to scuba dive, and everything changed. From very early on, that connection with the ocean was the most valuable thing I possessed. Once I understood that, the path became clear: I wanted to do everything in my power to save it.

Over two decades of diving and photographing marine megafauna—whales, sharks, mantas—I’ve watched places change in real time. Reefs I photographed fifteen years ago look completely different today. That journey took me to some fascinating places. I spent time as Environmental Director on Mustique in the Caribbean, where I saw up close how a small island community manages the tension between exclusive tourism and fragile marine ecosystems—and how much difference hands-on stewardship can make when the will is there.

I also worked in Saudi Arabia during a period of enormous coastal development along the Red Sea, home to some of the most pristine and climate-resilient reefs left on the planet. Those two experiences, at opposite ends of the scale, taught me the same lesson: the decisions that determine the ocean’s future are being made right now, often faster than science and governance can keep up.

When you witness decline first-hand, and you’ve also spent time inside big institutions like Accenture, WWF, and the United Nations seeing how slowly the system responds, you eventually reach a point where you feel you have to build something yourself. That’s where Vital Ocean came from.

3. Why do you believe protecting the ocean matters, not just for surfers and coastal communities, but for everyone?

Vincent Kneefel: Because the ocean isn’t a place; it’s a life-support system. It produces roughly half the oxygen we breathe, it has absorbed about a third of the carbon we’ve emitted, and it regulates the climate for every person on the planet, whether they’ve ever seen a beach or not. It also feeds billions of people and underpins an economy worth trillions. The mistake we make is thinking of ocean health as an environmental issue. It’s an everything issue: food security, climate stability, economic resilience. Surfers just happen to be closer to the front line, so they notice earlier.

But there’s a deeper layer too. The ocean is also a place of healing and even spiritual connection. Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols called it “Blue Mind,” the measurable state of calm and clarity we experience in, on, or near water. Every surfer knows that feeling, even if they’ve never had a name for it. Our connection with nature is the relationship we’ve neglected most as humans, yet it’s arguably the most important one for our survival as a species.

Protecting the ocean isn’t just about saving ecosystems out there; it’s about preserving something essential in ourselves.

4. What is Vital Ocean currently doing that you believe can make a meaningful difference to the health of our oceans?

Vincent Kneefel: The core problem we work on is that ocean decisions are painfully slow and fragmented. Decisions like permitting an offshore project, designing a marine protected area, or avoiding whale strikes involve mountains of data scattered across agencies, scientific papers, and stakeholder groups, often taking years. The ocean doesn’t have years.

We’ve built OceanIQ, which we describe as an operating system for ocean decisions. It combines a marine-specialised AI, a digital twin of the ocean—essentially a living 4D model—and a shared interface where regulators, industry, and scientists can work from the same picture.

We’re running a live pilot with NOAA at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in the US, and we were recognised this year by the White House as a Permitting Innovator. The idea is simple: if you can compress a decision that takes three years into days or weeks without cutting corners on science, you change what’s possible for both protection and sustainable use.

5. What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about ocean conservation today?

Vincent Kneefel: That it’s about saying no to everything. Conservation often gets framed as anti-development, anti-business, anti-progress. In reality, the best outcomes come when good projects happen faster in the right places, and bad projects get stopped early with clear evidence.

Another misconception is that the ocean is too big to fix, or too big to break. Neither is true. We’ve proven we can break it, and we’ve also proven—with recovering whale populations and well-managed marine protected areas—that it heals remarkably fast when we give it the chance.

6. The surfing industry has a particularly close relationship with the ocean. Where do you think the industry is doing well, and where does it still need to improve?

Vincent Kneefel: Culturally, surfing punches far above its weight. I’m a kitesurfer and hydrofoil surfer myself, and there’s nothing I love more than being out on the water with pure stoke—so I say this as someone who lives it: everyone who rides a wave or dives carries an enormous responsibility to be an advocate for the ocean. It gives us so much; the least we can do is speak up for it.

And surfers have been some of the most effective ocean advocates on the planet. Organisations born from surf culture have driven real change on water quality, plastic pollution, and coastal protection. The industry has also made genuine progress on materials—recycled wetsuit rubber, bio-resins, and better supply-chain transparency from the leading brands.

7. If you could change one thing about the way the surfing industry designs, manufactures, or sells its products, what would it be?

Vincent Kneefel: Design for longevity and end-of-life from day one. A surfboard or wetsuit should not be a disposable product. If I could change one thing, it would be making durability, repairability, and take-back schemes the industry standard rather than the niche exception.

A board or suit that lasts twice as long halves its footprint, and a brand that takes its products back owns the whole story of what it makes. The technology and materials largely exist. What’s missing is the collective will to make it the default.

8. There are so many organisations and individuals working to protect the ocean. Who or what is inspiring you right now and who should our readers be following?

Vincent Kneefel: I’d point people towards the Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco, which is doing serious work on ocean finance: getting real capital flowing into ocean solutions, which is where the bottleneck actually is.

On the science side, the researchers doing unglamorous long-term work, people like Professor Helene Marsh on dugongs, or the teams working on North Atlantic right whale protection, deserve far more attention than they get.

And honestly, I’m most inspired by local communities: the small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean leading on marine protection with a fraction of the resources of wealthy nations. Vanuatu protecting its dugongs and Barbados pushing its blue economy. That’s leadership.

9. Looking ahead 10 years, what would you like to see change in the relationship between people, business, and the ocean?

Vincent Kneefel: I’d like ocean health to become visible in every decision that touches it, similar to how carbon has become visible over the last decade. Right now the ocean is economically invisible: its value doesn’t show up on balance sheets, so its destruction doesn’t either.

In ten years, I want a world where a coastal developer, a shipping company, or a government can see, in real time, what a decision does to the ocean, and where businesses that regenerate the ocean outcompete the ones that degrade it. We have the tools to make that real. The next decade decides whether we actually use them.

10. Finally, if you could leave our readers with one message about their own relationship with the ocean, what would you say?

Vincent Kneefel: Get in the water, and pay attention while you’re there. Everything I’ve done for twenty years traces back to moments underwater that changed me: eye contact with a whale, a reef exploding with life. You protect what you love, and you love what you know. So know your ocean.

Learn your local break’s ecosystem, ask where your gear comes from, use your voice. Surfers see the ocean more often and more intimately than almost anyone else on Earth. That’s not just a privilege, it’s a responsibility. Be its advocate.