Serial entrepreneur aims to build one million square metres of tolerant reef

A telecommunications entrepreneur who has founded companies with enterprise values of more than $5 billion has his sights on an audacious and likely controversial project to build new reefs to combat the effects of coral bleaching.

Bevan Slattery is no stranger to large-scale developments. He made a name for himself in 2009, along with Shark Tank's Steve Baxter, by building a 7,000km cable from Australia to Guam which he claims cut the cost of international internet capacity by 75 per cent at the time.

Since then he has founded data centre group NextDC (ASX: NXT), built a submarine cable in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour with Megaport (ASX: MP1) to connect a huge data park as a gateway to China, and now another of his companies Superloop (ASX: SLC) is building a cable between Singapore, Jakarta, Perth and Sydney in a bid to give Australians cheaper bandwidth.

As a "hobby" he also founded Cloudscene, a leading global directory of data centres and service providers.

But Biopixel Oceans Foundation is a totally different kettle of fish.

"Early last year we made the decision to do what we call the industrialisation and manufacturing of tolerant reefs - we're going to completely upend people's thinking about how you actually restore the reef," Slattery says. Read more

Matt Ogg - Business News Australia - 17 August 2018