This profile is part of the Sacramento Business Journal's Inno Under 25 feature.
Sacramento Inno Under 25 recognizes entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and scientists in the Sacramento regional business ecosystem.
These talented young people are trailblazers who have seen opportunities, created new products or started their own companies at an age when many people are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. The candidates are all under 25 by the end of this year, and they live or work in local counties.
Tzvi Lev Weber, 23
Co-founder, Purpuratus
Tzvi Lev Weber sees some value where others see a pest. Colonies of sea urchin are destroying healthy natural habitats in underwater kelp forests.
Weber’s nascent company Purpuratus has been working to develop useful and economically viable products from sea urchin spines and shells, which would create an economic incentive to harvest them in the wild, where active sea urchins are creating dead zones in areas that had previously been healthy kelp forests. Kelp forests sequester more carbon than timber forests.
Sea urchin roe is a delicacy for many people, and usually when something is a delicacy, humans manage to knock down the population by over-harvesting them.
But sea urchins have this peculiar behavior that makes them go nearly dormant once they have eaten all of a kelp forest, Weber said. The urchin’s main predators, the sea star and starfish, have been plagued with a viral wasting disease for over a decade from Mexico to Alaska that has knocked their population down by more than 90%.
That leaves billions of nearly dormant urchin in the sea. They don’t die; they just go on a starvation diet surviving off spores in the water. Eating the spores keeps the kelp from coming back, and since urchins are on a starvation diet, they don’t put energy into reproduction, which would make them attractive to people and sea otters.
"They are just kind of worthless,” Weber said. “Unless you repurpose them like we are doing."
Weber and two co-founders, Mikel Lemoine and Andrew Matayoshi, have been working on the concept of Purpuratus for two years. The company will incorporate this spring, and plans to use urchin spines and shells to produce products.
The most valuable product is a natural purple pigment that can replace toxic synthetic chemical dyes. The pigment is produced by pulverizing the hard products and treating them with a chemical bath. One of the byproducts of that process is calcium citrate, a bio-available dietary supplement vitamin C. The pigment is worth about $500 a pound and the calcium citrate is worth about $20 a pound.
Purpuratus and Weber have raised money for the cause by winning pitch competitions, and it has partnered with the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, and it is working with the California Sea Urchin Commission.
Weber graduated in August from University of California Davis with a degree in industrial and product design.
“I saw this problem, and I saw that it was not being addressed,” he said. There are so many concerns around global warming and climate change, that people can get fatigued thinking about them, he said. “This is not a matter of people’s actions causing a concern. It is a matter of people’s inaction and lack of intervention causing a concern.”
