Announcement Fact Sheet

Target announcement date: flexible, April 2022 (after all investors have finished investing)

Objectives of Announcement

Recruiting – attract candidates interested in sustainability / ML-CV-IOT Engineering
Sustainability thought leadership – establish sustainability thought leadership through aquaculture
BD – attract companies who may be interested in partnering with Aquabyte
- Can also be policymakers interested in Aquabyte’s work on the aquaculture policy side
- Can also be on the marketing side (supermarkets, large tech companies, etc within the supply chain)

Aquabyte – a company enabling fish farmers to have insight into their production through machine learning /CV-enabled cameras – announces $25M of Series B funding led by SoftBank Ventures, with participation from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and MassMutual Ventures, to enable radically better fish farming across global fish species.

What has changed since Series A?

Grew to 25+ companies across four countries
Deployed over 150 systems monitoring salmon and trout
Grew team to over 40 people with offices in USA, Norway, and Chile
First to have approval by dispensation for automatic sea lice counting by the Norwegian food safety authorities
Over 250M fish detected

Other notes

This is the first private / VC investment through the TNC endowment

Existing

Fish farming is the fastest growing sector of food production in the world: $240B globally. More farmed fish than wild caught, more farmed fish than beef (source: Nature Conservancy ($243.5B in 2019) and New Scientist)
By 2050, it is estimated there will be a 50% protein gap world-wide (source: WRI (69%) and Nutreco (70 – 100%) and Buhler (50%))
Over 50% of cost is feed (need source or calibrate amount; source: NOAA (60%))
ML models that more effectively feed over the lifetime of a fish therefore increasing productivity and efficiency dramatically.
Fish farming is complex: water temperature and dissolved oxygen shifts, daylight, fish health and diseases, amount of food to feed and when, intermingling with wild fish populations (etc.)
Regulations are increasing to control sea lice and overall biomass, requiring fish farmers to get more sophisticated to succeed. 2017 Norway passed laws to limit fish farm growth based on sea lice counts, placing huge incentives for farmers better manage production
Norway is the largest salmon farming nation ($10B alone); grown in massive net pens (200K fish per pen). Fully mechanized with someone watching pellets and toggling feed based on screens.

Cameras in fish pens are able to determine fish’s weight, growth, and health to use to better feed, treat, and harvest the fish. This data is provided through a simple dashboard farmers use to make decisions
Computer vision and machine learning are used under-the-hood to enable systems to run at scale
Technology is sophisticated enough to enable recognition of fish individuals
Data can eventually be used to power a fully autonomous fish farm

$25M Series B financing
SoftBank Ventures
The Nature Conservancy
MassMutual Ventures (to be confirmed)
Movie star / celebrity (to be unnamed)
All existing pro rata investors (including ArcTern Ventures at super pro rata)
- Costanoa Ventures
- New Enterprise Associates
- ArcTern Ventures
- Alliance Venture
- Struck Capital

Aquabyte is based in San Francisco and Bergen, Norway.
It was founded by Bryton Shang.
Team is 50+ people.

Bryton Shang

Founder & CEO

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Announcement Fact Sheet

What?

Why does this matter? Why now?

How?

Who Invested?

Company Facts

Bryton Shang

Aquabyte Inc.