If you are craving a delicious and reasonably priced meal of fresh seafood that is now humanely and sustainably sourced, you are out of luck.
Connection overfishing and climate shocks have decimated populations of fish and other marine creatures around the world. And while farm-raised seafood may look like a more sustainable alternative, it exists big concerns around overpopulation and disease.
Meanwhile, cell-based seafood still seems years away from mass-market readiness. And vegan alternatives – plant-based products with a fishy flavor and texture – do not have the same dietary value or appeal to consumers as original products.
The difficult state of today’s seafood industry may help explain why a lot of capital has flowed into startups trying to improve the establishment. Seafood startups have sprung up in the last few years raised collectively nearly $3 billion so far, in response to Crunchbase.
To get a sense of where capital is going, we have curated a list of 39 funded corporations in this space, listed below:
Pisces, agriculture and finance
The seafood farming sector has already anointed at least one unicorn (or, we would say, “piscicorn”). Indonesian startup in the aquaculture industry eFishing picked up $200 million in Series D financing in July at a reported valuation of greater than $1 billion.
The company promotes its smart feeding technology as promoting sustainability in addition to saving fishermen and shrimp farmers money. Its systems aim to scale back undernutrition and overnutrition, which may cause pollution through nutrient runoff.
Aquabyte, which operates in Norway, San Francisco and Chile, is also a scaling technology that it says can promote healthier fish farming, mainly through underwater data collection and related analytics software. It closed $25 million in Series B financing last summer.
In Chennai, India, Aquaconnect He got hooked In December, $15 million building a platform that uses artificial intelligence and satellite distant sensing in aquaculture operations, helping farmers perform tasks from distributing feed to finding customers.
Cellular and alternative proteins
Much of the investment is also going to startups developing seafood options that do not involve catching or farming sea creatures.
Based in San Francisco Wild type, which breeds salmon for sushi made from fish cells, is one of the most financed. The 7-year-old company has earned over $120 million so far, including: Last yr, the series B cost $100 million.
A few miles away in Emeryville, California Food without fins starts with tuna. It has already launched a plant-based product, but the company says its long-term goal is to bring cell-cultured seafood alternatives to market.
From the side of plants Current dishesfrom which I prepare vegetarian tuna and salmon bites, last yr it raised $18 million. AND Food grown in waterwhich he received Seed funding totals $5.5 million in April, it recently revealed taste tests of its products, including spicy tuna rolls, salmon crudo and shrimp dumplings.
For now, it is unclear to what extent these alternatives are prone to develop. After major setbacks facing the plant-based meat industry, seafood startups and the enterprise firms that fund them are charting a latest course by spreading funding among fewer corporations.
As agriculture develops, not all ventures end in success
Recent history also teaches us that enormous investments do not all the time translate into a scalable business.
An example here is the Brooklyn location Farms upa start-up company promoting aquaponics, a closed-loop farming system that uses fish to fertilize crops. Business announced is closing this spring, noting that as scalable enterprises grow, “vertical farming becomes almost infinitely complex.”
At the same time, nonetheless, aquaculture still exhibits the curvature of a classic growth market. According to united nation‘S Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nationsaquaculture production has reached approx all-time record in 2020, with production over 60% higher than the average in the Nineties. People are also eating more aquatic foods than ever before – twice as much per capita as they did 50 years ago.
The challenge in the future will likely be to seek out ways to satisfy our appetites in ways in which are less harmful to sea creatures. We hope that startups can play a role in making this a reality.
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