Four years ago, Patrick Duffy was ready to give up on Jospa, the Cork-based marine-tech business he co-founded with Joss Fitzsimons in 2008. The company had eaten into Duffy’s pension and the founders were failing to get their products to consumers.

“We said, ‘are we wasting our time? Will we close down and pay everybody anything we owe?’ which would have been very little,” said Duffy.

Before they threw in the towel however, the business partners had one more product idea that they believed had the potential to be used internationally. The product, the Jospa Tug, combats the level of pollution and emissions caused by marine trade.

The tug looks like “a Jacob’s Ladder in the water,” said Duffy, explaining that it is an attachment that can be used by all vessels carrying massive amounts of cargo, but with no fuel, no crew, and no emissions, and is propelled only by waves.

“There are huge amounts of shipping say from Brazil to China and they’re burning 75 tons of oil a day. That’s a lot of money and a lot of pollution,” said Duffy.

Besides transporting vessels, the tug can be used to carry vast amounts of water to drought-stricken locations and harvest ocean waste, according to Duffy.

As pollution becomes increasingly high on the government agendas worldwide, Duffy believes there is a growing market for the Jospa Tug.

Duffy believes in the concept and in the business. But can he get it off the ground – and into the water?

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The business is a small one and has just four people in total working on developing the Jospa Tug in its small blue fronted office in Cork. At this point, none of them get salaries, including its founders.

However, Duffy is looking to grow the company to at least 50 paid employees in the next two years. The product is still in the research and development stage and will need funding to get it out to market and into the sea.

“At the start of Covid, we had a big international company talking with us and were pretty interested in getting involved. They are a company which has a lot of companies all over the world. I couldn’t believe the figure,” said Duffy.

Unfortunately for Jospa, this potential partner couldn’t make any new commitments due to the financial impact of the pandemic.

Approximately €1 million has been put into the business so far, mostly through self-funding and angel investors. Some money came from Enterprise Ireland and SEAI grants that the founders got for their initial projects when they set up Jospa, but “they haven’t had a penny on the tug side”, according to Duffy.

“We always have the notion that a guy like Jeff Bezos or something will say ‘I really like that, don’t worry about the cost, just do it’. But the problem is even to get to the attention of Jeff Bezos and so on, we have to get a certain way first,” said Duffy.

For now, Duffy is not chasing VC funding but is hopeful about other methods of funding on the horizon, such as carbon credits. These are tradable credits given to companies that cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

“The carbon credits that we would be able to get should be immense. Unfortunately, the shipping sector hasn’t organised carbon credit yet. The IMO is working on it with the EU. But they may be a few years away, that will make a huge difference to us. We would be worth millions upon millions based on carbon credits immediately,” said Duffy.

The golden figure needed to be able to speed up development of the tug and increase the staff is €3 million. Once Jospa gets that funding, Duffy said it will take two years to make the company commercial.

Finding funding for Irish marine-tech

Despite being surrounded by ocean and opportunity, there are some factors holding back Irish marine focused companies, according to Duffy. One is the closure of the Irish Marine and Energy Research Cluster (IMERC) which was established in 2010 by University College Cork, Cork Institute of Technology, and the Irish Naval Service.

In 2016, UCC and CIT stated it was “not fit for purpose” and shut it down. The organisation commercialised marine research and its closure has made it harder for entrepreneurs in the marine-tech space to pursue projects.

Funding has not been easy to find for marine-tech start-ups as well, something Duffy is very familiar with.

“The marine industry is notoriously nearly the least popular to invest in, as the returns and development are very slow. It’s very risky because the sea is such an incredible force to deal with,” he said.

The lack of funding has been a historical issue for Jospa. It’s what brought their first venture to a halt. The founders were creating a product that would convert wave energy into electricity. This project ended up being too futuristic and it was “impossible” to get funding for it.

In the 13 years since Jospa was created, getting funding for new projects and products in marine-tech is still difficult.

“We haven’t made as much progress as we’d like because funding is always difficult, and it is very expensive. And we don’t we don’t pay ourselves any salaries or anything, which is difficult as well. But you need to spend a lot on testing. A day’s testing could cost you over €1,000 for rental of the test facilities and you might do seven or 10 days testing in a row,” said Duffy. 

On top of this, Duffy and Fitzsimons needed to secure a patent for the Jospa Tug. Getting the patent was a simple process for both Duffy and Fitzsimons as they had been through this process with other projects even prior to co-founding Jopsa. The cost of it was the hefty sum of €20,000, which put Jospa under more financial pressure.

Keeping Jospa afloat

Jospa has survived treacherous conditions before. Duffy, a former Fulbright Scholar and electrical engineer by trade, and mechanical engineer Fitzsimons decided to create it during the recession, and it has gobbled up money since.

The pair met when they both worked for a glasswool insulation manufacturer called Moy Insulation. Duffy was the MD and Fitzsimons was the CTO. Moy was eventually acquired by multinationals in 1986.

Duffy and Fitzsimons went their separate ways for a few years, but in the mid-noughties they saw the level of opportunity coming out of the marine-tech space.

Through doing consultancy work in the UK and putting their own money into Jospa, they have kept it going. All because they believe their Jospa Tug can bring about positive change across the sea.