Bringing ocean experiences to the world

Our Mission

Ma Oceans’ goal is to be a force multiplier for the ocean conservation community. There are thousands of organizations around the globe engaged in ocean conservation and environmental impact. They're doing the conservation work, and yet their efforts are largely unknown to the global population. At the same time, the ocean ecosystem is critical for the health of the planet, and ordinary citizens are taking actions each day which destroy this system. This is why the impact of the interaction between humans and the ocean needs to be brought to the attention of everyone.

We understand that our enemy is the system that decades of short term thinking has created. Ocean conservation is under-funded when compared to the importance of the ocean in planetary health and stability. We take a more nuanced approach, combining our understanding of return on capital and impact. By marrying the two we expect to enable ocean stewardship efforts to become self-sustainable and attract larger pools of capital. In turn, people learn about the ocean, ocean conservation efforts are better funded, and the ocean itself is better supported.

The decade 2021 - 2030, is the United Nations decade of ocean science. Using storytelling, games and digital media, we aim to make science accessible to a larger audience. We strive to inspire people through the immersive power of ocean stories to become advocates of the ocean, changing their purchasing behavior and habits in order to embrace a sustainable lifestyle.

Our Impact

We have three key areas of impact, and it's only through the creative combination of them all that we can succeed:

Immersive Ocean Experiences through Planet Ocean

We bring ocean relationships and functions to life through immersive virtual reality experiences for all ages. Our participants learn about the ocean, its ecosystems, their functions, and the actions humans can take to restore life in critical zones. Through the unique combination of myth and storytelling, scientific knowledge about animal and ocean behavior, and the latest technology, people become involved in the health of the oceans and learn how their actions and those of our conservationists impact the ocean. We work with immersive live experiences, video games, virtual reality, and more.
Supporting Ocean Research and Conservation

We support ocean research initiatives, partnering with the Marine Conservation Institute, to remain at the forefront of knowledge and data regarding our ocean ecosystems. Critical currents and ocean corridors are being attacked through human actions in different ways, and the impacts of these actions are slowly becoming known. Through supporting research, we make sure our experiences respond to real-time and real-life challenges that the ocean is undergoing.
Impact Investments in Ocean-Related Business

Ocean capital has great potential, when it is stewarded with care and respect for the ocean's limits and boundaries. We invest in companies and projects that support the sustainable use of the ocean's ecosystem, such as Glass Half Full in New Orleans, and Ocean's Bounty by marine scientist Kabir Parker.

Meet the Team

Nandita Parker

Captain and Founder

Nandita Agarwal Parker has spent a career learning how systems move, and a lifetime asking what moves people.

She came to the financial world in the early 1990s, beginning on Wall Street before returning to India to help build the institutional architecture of its capital markets. She pioneered equities research there in 1994, launched India's first alternative investment fund for global investors in 2004 through Karma Capital Management, and spent nearly two decades at the intersection of emerging-market finance, ESG investing, and the long-cycle thinking required to understand what anything is actually worth.

That infrastructure-level thinking — how to build platforms that persist, how to align incentives across complex systems,how to move capital toward outcomes that compound over time — now underlies everything she creates.

Ma Oceans, founded in 2019, is less an organization than an operating system: a platform architecture designed to unify the fragmented ocean conservation ecosystem, aligning science, capital,storytelling, and technology under a shared intelligence framework. Its central concept, Ocean Intelligence, asserts that while machine learning can model the future, it is the ocean, a 3.5-billion-year adaptive intelligence system that contains the actual code for planetary survival.

The Embassy of the Ocean is her most original institutional invention: a global network of cultural hubs where ocean literacy is transmitted not through information, but through encounter, where a human being meets the marine world at the level of feeling, not just fact. Planet Ocean, the immersive exhibit arm of Ma Oceans, debuted at the 55th International Film Festival of India in 2024, using VR and experiential design to convert visitors' passive awareness into measured behavioral commitments. Over 900 visitors. 85% pledged.

Parker's work rests on a conviction she does not often state directly, but enacts in everything she builds: that the gap between humanity and the ocean is not a knowledge gap. It is a feeling gap. And feeling gaps can only be closed through experience, beauty, and the kinds of encounters that remake what a person is willing to protect.

Advisory Board

Marcus Eriksen

Scientific Advisor

Marcus Eriksen is the Executive Director and co-founder of Leap Lab, a center
for sustainability. He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of
plastic marine pollution, which has included expeditions sailing through all 5
subtropical gyres, Bay of Bengal, Southern Ocean and inland lakes and rivers -
publishing the first global estimate of all plastic of all sizes floating in the
world’s oceans in 2015. Today Eriksen’s work is focused on working with
corporations and cities to achieve “zero waste” goals, through biomaterials,
waste-free packaging and products, and smarter materials management
systems.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani

Strategic Advisor

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is the Founder of Info Edge India Ltd. - the company that owns Naukri.com, India’s leading job site. It also owns 99acres.com, Jeevansathi.com and Shiksha.com. In addition it has invested in promising internet start-ups such as Zomato, Policybazaar, Shopkirana, Ustraa, Gramophone and Printo, among others.Sanjeev schooled at St. Columba’s School in New Delhi.  He studied Economics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University (1981-1984) and  began his career working in advertising with Lintas. He then went to IIM Ahmedabad and graduated from there in 1989, to join the consumer marketing firm HMM Ltd.(now called Glaxo SmithKline Consumer Healthcare Ltd.).  He quit his job for entrepreneurship eighteen months later.


P.K. Agarwal

Strategic Advisor

A celebrated technology and academic leader in Silicon Valley, PK Agarwal serves as the Dean of UC Santa Cruz Extension in Silicon Valley. Prior to this, he was the Dean and CEO of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley, where he oversaw the startup and growth of the University by creating innovative programs, working with major employers, and contributing the economic vitality of the San Francisco Bay Area.

PK Agarwal holds a Master of Science, Operations Research from UC Berkeley and a Master of Science, Mechanical Engineering from California State University-Sacramento. He attained a Bachelor of Technology, Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Bill Shireman

Strategic Advisor

Bill Shireman has an uncanny ability to cut through dogma and find common ground – even between those who love to hate each other.  He designed California's best-in-the-nation recycling system, brokered the first global supply chain standards for forest protection, united campus activities with corporate leaders to help build civil institutions in Sudan, and is now bringing the political left and right to protect the environment. He has been uniting political adversaries for more than 30 years – capitalists, activists, conservatives, and progressives.  He teaches the art to future business and political leaders at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and in his seven books.  He practices it as President of Future 500, where he and his colleagues bring together corporate and environmental leaders to protect the world’s forests, oceans, and climate.  He helps conservatives and progressives find solutions together as board members and mentor of Bridge Alliance and Bridge USA.  A walking contradiction, Shireman is a life-long Republican environmentalist dedicated to the goals of progressives and the means of conservatives.  Bill believes the economy and nature are part of the same system, and that the political right and left are complementary opposites, only able to accomplish their ends together.  He lives in San Francisco with his wife Aileen and two of his three children.

Sea Suite

Kabir Parker

Marine Scientist

Kabir is a passionate freediver, researcher, conservationist, and videographer. He has spent time in a multitude of ocean ecosystems, from coral reefs to kelp forests, documenting marine life and the impact human beings have on marine habitats. He lives by the saying “Dive everywhere” because one never knows what experience the ocean may throw at you. Kabir has experience researching coral-zooxanthellae symbiosis as well as microbes involved in oil spill cleanup. As part of an internship at NASA he developed satellite image models of what plastic signals look like in the ocean. With this project he represented the United States at the Our Ocean Youth Leadership Summit in Oslo, Norway in 2019. He recently graduated from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science with degrees in Marine Science and Microbiology. Kabir is an authorized AAUS Scientific Diver, PADI Rescue Diver, and an AIDA Master Freediver. In his free time, he enjoys spearfishing, which he believes to be the most selective and sustainable form of fishing when practiced responsibly.

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