Halifax’s Clean Valley CIC is the only Atlantic Canadian startup among 15 to be selected for Silicon Valley accelerator Thrive’s third Canadian cohort.

Thrive, which is run by the West Coast agri-food VC firm SVG Ventures, offers startup founders three months of training and mentorship, as well as the chance to participate in Alberta Innovation Week in May and later visit California.

Based in Halifax with pilot projects in Portugal and New Brunswick, meanwhile, Clean Valley is developing technology for growing algae in wastewater from land-based aquaculture pens. It is not the first business to explore using aquaculture effluent to farm algae, but what makes Clean Valley unusual is founder Nicholas LaValle's plans to repurpose the algae produced as oyster food.

The company is trialing its system with Portuguese aquaculture operator SEAentia at a facility that farms a ray-finned fish called meagre. The algae cannot be fed to the meagre because finned fish generally require animal protein, but the oyster farming market alone offers a use for the algae that is likely to prove more lucrative than other possible applications, LaValle has said. Several of Clean Valley’s peer companies, for example, provide algae to the pharmaceutical industry, but the purity standards required are extraordinarily high, unlike for oyster feed.

LaValle has said previously that Clean Valley is in the process of raising a pre-seed funding round, and the company recently graduated from Energia Ventures, the Fredericton-based accelerator affiliated with University of New Brunswick, as well as Invest Nova Scotia’s GeenShoots accelerator for agtech, biotech and cleantech startups.

His company is also one of 30 shortlisted to vye for $25,000 from the Black Entrepreneurs & Businesses of Canada Society, with the next round of judging to be adjudicated via the community's choice.