Sweat, Seaweed, and Shellfish
Three very different bets on Maine’s future.
☀️Good morning, Maine Startups Insider Community!
This issue captures Maine’s innovation economy at three very different stages.
A Portland venture builder spins out a women’s health wearable built on sweat-based biosensing. A marine scientist turns seaweed into a premium cookie brand without leaving academia. And a Castine blue-tech company raises $1.3 million to scale traceability tools for the shellfish industry.
Frontier healthtech. Working waterfront software. Freezer aisle entrepreneurship. And a litte tax policy…
Let’s get into it.
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/The Scoop📰
Ateklo Spins Out EliVive to Build Sweat-Based Hormone Tracking Platform
A Portland deep-tech venture builder has unveiled its latest spinout, aiming to change how women monitor hormonal health. Ateklo Inc. announced the launch of EliVive Inc., a company developing a wearable and software platform designed to track hormone patterns through sweat. The goal is to move beyond invasive tests and intermittent measurements by enabling more frequent, non-invasive data collection that reflects how hormones shift throughout daily life.
EliVive is emerging from stealth with a microfluidic sensor system that captures hormonal signals from sweat and pairs that data with AI-driven software. The platform combines microfluidics, electrochemical sensing, and machine learning to interpret repeated readings and translate them into individualized insights.
“The ultimate goal of EliVive’s mission is to change the way we understand and approach women’s hormonal health,” said Martina Marrali, CEO and co-founder. “As two women who face challenges with our hormonal health, we know first hand how little data and insights are actually accessible.”
Dr. Liza White, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder, said the team believes advances in biosensing science and AI can unlock biological signals that have historically been overlooked. The company is building toward real-time hormone monitoring and personalized analysis.
EliVive originated through Ateklo’s venture building model, which pairs technical researchers with operators to advance frontier science into product-ready companies. Ateklo has made an initial investment in the company and will continue supporting it as it moves toward MVP development and validation testing.
Justin Hafner, founder and CEO of Ateklo and a founding board member of EliVive, said the team demonstrated an ability to move quickly from hypothesis to prototype during Ateklo’s summer fellowship program.
EliVive is now building relationships with wellness device companies, women’s health providers, and potential early users. The company plans to expand its advisory network across healthtech, biotech, femtech, AI, and finance as it advances toward technical and clinical milestones.
/The Founder Interview🎤
The Scientist Who Put Seaweed in a Cookie
By the time Jessie Muhlin starts explaining seaweed, most people realize how little they’ve been paying attention.
It’s not their fault. Seaweed spends half its life underwater, the other half ignored. It clings to rocks along Maine’s coast, quietly doing the kind of work ecosystems depend on and humans rarely notice. Muhlin has built a career on noticing it anyway.
For nearly two decades, she has taught marine biology at Maine Maritime Academy, specializing in intertidal ecology and marine macroalgae. Her research focuses on the narrow, slippery band of coastline that disappears and reappears with the tide. Rockweed. Kelp. The overlooked infrastructure of coastal life.
A little over a year ago, she added another role to her résumé: frozen cookie dough founder.
The business is called Buba OG, and it makes premium frozen cookie dough using a Maine-first supply chain. More than half of the ingredients come from Maine farmers and producers. One flavor includes seaweed.
This is not a pivot story. Muhlin did not burn out on academia or decide to “take a leap.” She did not rebrand herself as a founder or start speaking in growth metrics. She still teaches full time. She still identifies first as a scientist.
The cookies came from somewhere quieter.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Seaweed, Muhlin likes to remind people, touches almost everything. It shapes shorelines. It feeds marine life. It influences gut health. It shows up in cosmetics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals. Most people never connect it to their daily lives.
“It’s literally hidden,” she says. “Half the time underwater. And hidden from view in how much it touches people.”
That invisibility has always bothered her. So has the way seaweed is framed as niche or exotic or, worse, unapproachable. When Muhlin teaches marine botany, she teaches it through food. Eating algae, she’s found, is the fastest way to understand it.
For years, she brought food into her classroom. Sometimes she bought it. Sometimes she made it herself. Recipes became teaching tools. Texture and flavor became entry points to taxonomy and ecology.
One recipe stuck.
A lemon cookie with seaweed folded into the dough.
Students remembered it long after the course ended. They asked for it. They missed it. They joked about retaking Marine Botany just to eat it again.
At some point, the joke stopped feeling like a joke.
Not an Entrepreneur
Muhlin is quick to say that entrepreneurship was never part of the plan. She trained as a scientist. She built a career around research, teaching, and public scholarship. The idea of sales and marketing felt foreign at best.
“I didn’t want to give up the job I have,” she says. “It’s a core part of my identity.”
What she wanted was a way to share something she believed in. Food as education. Seaweed as ingredient, not novelty. Maine as a system, not a brand.
When she started talking to people about the idea, she did it the way she does everything else: methodically. Conversations instead of pitches. Questions instead of decks.
At the University of Maine’s food pilot plant, she found encouragement rather than skepticism. She met other food founders. She was introduced to operators who had built real businesses without following a startup playbook.
What mattered most were the people who didn’t come from entrepreneurship either. Scientists. Clinicians. Academics who had added a second act without erasing the first.
That made it feel possible.
The Freezer Problem
Frozen cookie dough, it turns out, is not an easy category.
Freezer space is limited. Specialty food stores may only have one or two freezers. Every slot is contested by something delicious and familiar. Something that sells quickly.
Buba OG is neither cheap nor familiar. It’s a premium product in a moment when disposable income is tight. It asks customers to bake, not just buy. It asks retailers to tell a story.
What has worked is values alignment. The stores that carry Buba OG tend to care deeply about resilient food systems. They understand that one product can support many others. Maine eggs. Maine butter. Maine grains.
Carrying the cookies means carrying a network.
“It’s not just my product,” Muhlin says. “Other people benefit along the way.”
That doesn’t make the economics easier. Maine ingredients cost more. Margins are thin. Insurance alone is enough to test anyone’s resolve.
Asked how the business is doing financially, Muhlin doesn’t sugarcoat it.
“Terrible,” she says, laughing. “Absolutely dreadful.”
She’s not hemorrhaging money. She’s not profitable either. The math hasn’t clicked yet.
What has clicked is the work itself.
Slow Enough to Be Honest
There is a quiet advantage to not needing the business to succeed immediately. Muhlin’s academic career gives her something rare in consumer-packaged goods: time.
She can move slowly. She can experiment. She can learn without panic.
The kitchen she rents understands that. The people around her understand that. The business is allowed to breathe.
That doesn’t mean she’s casual about it. She has been through the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs Top Gun program. She has mentors. She tracks costs. She wrestles with pricing and positioning.
She is also learning to be persistent in ways academia never taught her to be. In science, eight follow-ups is harassment. In sales, it’s often table stakes.
That recalibration has been uncomfortable.
So has marketing.
“We’re trained to inform,” she says. “Not to convince.”
Cookies Are Not for Kids
One of Muhlin’s biggest unresolved questions is deceptively simple: who is this for?
Cookies are often coded as children’s food. Frozen cookie dough carries its own assumptions. Muhlin doesn’t buy any of it.
“Adults love cookies,” she says. “Cookies are for everyone.”
Her customers tend to agree. The challenge is reaching them. Especially in Southern Maine, where competition is fierce and shelf space is scarce.
Success, for now, is measured in relationships. A few more stores. A few more repeat buyers. Trust built slowly.
Growth can wait.
If It Can’t Exist This Way
Muhlin is unwavering on one point: if the business can’t exist while supporting other Maine businesses, it shouldn’t exist at all.
There are no shortcuts that make sense to her. No cheaper inputs she’s willing to substitute. No version of the company that abandons its values for scale.
“That’s not something I can change,” she says. “And I don’t want to.”
It’s a scientist’s answer. Hypothesis tested. Conclusion reached.
Moving From Thought to Action
Asked what advice she’d give another scientist sitting on a commercial idea, Muhlin pauses.
“I don’t know that I would have wanted advice,” she says. “Someone might have told me it was a bad idea.”
Then she reframes it.
“So much of what we do lives in our heads. What if. I could have. I should have.”
Her advice is simpler than expected.
“Try it,” she says. “You don’t have to go all in. You don’t have to blow up your life. But move from thought to action.”
It’s not reckless. It’s experimental.
Very scientific, actually.
Quiet Work
There is something fitting about a business built around seaweed. Something overlooked, steady, foundational.
Muhlin moves through a room with a steady presence. She listens closely. She gravitates toward the quieter voices, the ones who are thinking carefully before they speak.
Sometimes, those are the ones building the most interesting things.
Buba OG may or may not scale. The freezer problem may or may not resolve. The revenue line may take longer than anyone would like.
But the work makes sense.
And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.
—
To explore Professor Muhlin’s work in marine macroalgae and intertidal ecology, or her role as Chair of the Corning School of Ocean Studies at Maine Maritime Academy, click here.
To browse the full Buba OG cookie dough lineup, including Maine Maple, Blueberry Lemon, Oatmeal Butterscotch, Chocolate chip, click here.
/Funding Corner 💰
Shellfish Solutions Inc. Raises $1.31M Toward $2.5M Equity Round
Shellfish Solutions, the Castine-based company behind BlueTrace, has raised $1,314,996 toward a planned $2.5 million equity round, according to a recent Form D filing with the SEC. The raise is structured under Rule 506(b) and began with a first sale on January 9, 2026. Eleven investors have participated so far, leaving $1,185,004 remaining in the offering.
Founded in 2018, Shellfish Solutions builds mobile-friendly, waterproof tagging and traceability tools for the shellfish industry. Its platform helps growers, dealers, and wholesalers manage inventory and comply with state and federal regulations. The company originally operated as Oyster Tracker before rebranding to BlueTrace.
The filing lists Wyllys Terry as an executive officer and director, alongside directors David Ford, Abigail Carroll, Joe Raczka, and Cindy Lawr.
/Policy Corner 🏛️🌲
Tax Cliff Reversed: Maine Restores Immediate R&D Expensing for Startups
Catch up: Beginning January 1, 2026, Maine allowed small businesses to fully deduct domestic R&D expenses in the year they are incurred, reversing the federal Section 174 amortization rule that blindsided startups in 2022.
In 2022, a federal change to Section 174 required companies to spread R&D deductions over five years instead of deducting them immediately.
For startups, this created phantom profits. A company spending $500,000 on product development could suddenly show taxable income even if it broke even on paper.
The result was real tax bills for companies that were still burning cash.
Maine’s 2026 supplemental budget restores full, immediate expensing for small businesses with $31 million or less in annual gross receipts.
Larger companies must phase into conformity over five years, stretching through 2030. Lawmakers structured it this way to avoid a one-time hit to the state budget.
The most important piece is retroactive flexibility. Startups that were forced to amortize R&D costs in 2022, 2023, or 2024 may now be able to amend returns or elect a catch-up deduction under Maine law.For some companies, that means cash back into the business in 2026.
Early-stage companies live and die on cash flow. Maine’s move removes a distortion that punished companies for investing in product development
Disclaimer:
This summary is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax or legal advice. Tax treatment can vary based on individual circumstances. Founders should consult a qualified tax professional or CPA to understand how Maine’s conformity changes apply to their specific situation.
/Upcoming 📆
Meet Up: Blockchain, Policy, and the Future of Payments Happy Hour
Wednesday, February 25
5:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Oxbow Brewing, 49 Washington Ave, Portland
Maine’s blockchain community will gather at Oxbow Brewing for a policy-focused happy hour exploring how the state can lead in digital asset innovation and modern payment systems. The event brings together developers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and policymakers for an open discussion about where blockchain technology fits into Maine’s economic future.
Special guest Owen McCarthy, a local entrepreneur running to be Maine’s next governor, will join the conversation.
No prior blockchain experience is required. Curiosity is enough.
Sponsored by Stand With Crypto’s Maine Chapter
To register: https://luma.com/sntcgx9h
Until next time, Maine Startups Insider Community, keep grinding. This is the way.
-Whit Richardson & Chris Philbrook