The founders
Why we started
Every season, sargassum strands on Caribbean beaches. It is loaded into trucks and sent to landfill, and the coast pays for the clean-up. A few days earlier, out at sea, the same biomass was intact and worth refining.
We started Blue Sargassum to collect it there, before it strands, and turn it into ingredients that buyers pay for. The harvest pays for the clean-up, and the jobs stay in the region.
The project needs three skills: running operations at sea and on land, financing infrastructure, and designing a chemical plant. Each of us brings one of them.
JPA
Jean-Pierre Ahamada
CEO & co-founder
Saint-Cyr · Leadership and operations · Crisis management · Finance and strategy
Jean-Pierre leads teams and runs operations where nothing works by itself. Trained as an officer at Saint-Cyr, he spent twelve years serving the French State. In Africa he ran maintenance and logistics operations for the armed forces, where security, supply and continuity could never be taken for granted.
At the Ministry of the Interior he led 120 people and managed crises in mainland France and overseas, alongside prefects and ministers. Since 2023 he has worked in finance and strategy, restructuring a fast-growing international organisation. He leads the operating company.
FXB
François-Xavier Boul
Chairman & co-founder
École Centrale de Lyon · 25 years in infrastructure · USD 6bn+ of transactions closed
François-Xavier builds large projects and finds the money that makes them happen. An engineer of the École Centrale de Lyon, he has spent 25 years in energy, water and infrastructure, seventeen of them in the Middle East and North Africa. He knows the whole life of a project, from origination and structuring to financing and operation.
At ENGIE and Tabreed he closed more than USD 6bn of transactions, and he has chaired or sat on the boards of companies with total revenues exceeding hundreds of millions of USD. He chairs the group and brings his leadership, project finance and development expertise to the project.
FB
Frédéric Boubet
CTO & co-founder
Chemical engineer · 25 years in pharmaceuticals and chemicals · Sanofi · two-site director
Frédéric builds and runs production workshops. A chemical engineer with 25 years in pharmaceuticals and chemicals, he spent a decade at Sanofi, in extraction and purification, the trade of our plant, where he brought a revamped workshop into production for a new active ingredient. He then ran a fermentation unit of 45 people working around the clock, having earlier commissioned new installations with the main contractor for Serono and Firmenich.
He now directs two sites, one industrial and one R&D, as a member of the executive committee, and has managed teams of up to 160 people. He has also led investment projects on a Seveso 3 site and headed health, safety and environment for Sanofi's largest supply-chain platform. Extraction, purification, commissioning, running a site: he has done each of the jobs this plant needs, and he drew its process station by station.
