Commercial reef restoration platform
Coral Vita exists because reef restoration used to mean waiting decades for nature to do work the ocean no longer has time for. Co-founders Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern set out to change that timeline, building the world's first commercial, land-based coral farm in Freeport, Grand Bahama, in 2019, designed to grow corals in months rather than decades and turn restoration into a real business instead of a one-off grant project. Farming corals on land lets the team control conditions open-water nurseries can't, breeding for heat tolerance and disease resistance before corals ever go back into the ocean. That approach has produced more than 100,000 corals across 52 species, with active restoration sites now running in The Bahamas, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The work earned Coral Vita Prince William's Earthshot Prize and a spot on TIME Magazine's Best Inventions list for its BrainCoral technology platform, which tracks coral genetics and growth data across every farm. Restoration partnerships, coral adoptions, and licensing opportunities are all available at coralvita.co.