eFishery, the leading Indonesia-based aquaculture startup has raised $108 million in Series D funding, according to Tech In Asia. The company was valued at $1.3 billion, launching the company into unicorn status. https://news.crunchbase.com/ also added that this proves that aquaculture is swimming upstream.
42xfund, an investment management firm in United Arab Emirates, led the funding round with $100 million, and additional participation came from Northstar Group with $3 million and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 with $5million.
Aquaculture startups had its best funding year ever in 2022 when the sector raised $292 million across 42 startups, according to Crunchbase News. The industry has seen a steady incline in venture funding since 2013, when eFishery launched, said news.crunchbase.com
eFishery began in 2013 as a one stop shop for the aquaculture industry in Indonesia. The company started with a programmable fish farm feeder that dispenses food for shrimp farms and quickly developed disease prevention systems for those ecosystems. This accelerates harvesting of fish to 74 days.
It then expanded, providing an end-to-end e-commerce platform that allows farmers to buy niche products and gear and connects farmers with financial institutions that can provide flexible loans geared towards the fickle nature of aquaculture. it also has a distribution system that makes it easy for homes and businesses to order fish and get it delivered fresh or frozen.
More importantly, eFishery has an online marketplace that allows farmers to sell their yield directly to distributors and agents, often at a fairer price than most markets. On their website, eFishery says that it has 70,000 farmers from 280 towns in Indonesia and through technology, it facilitate freshwater fish transactions of up to 1.105 trillion IDR ($100.76 million), shrimp transactions of 1.125 trillion IDR ($ 84 million) and feed transactions up to 1.99 trillion IDR ($133 million). It has opened access for more than 7,000 farmers to financial Institutions and digitalised 70,000 farmers.
In 2022, eFishery, raised $90 million in Series C funding. This round was co-led by Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek, the Indian unit of VC firm Sequoia Capital, and Japanese tech giant SoftBank through its Vision Fund II. Its existing investors including Aqua-Spark, Wavemaker Partners, Northstar Group, and Go-Ventures — the VC arm of Indonesian tech group GoTo — also participated. It said that the funds will be deployed to expand eFishery’s digital platform and to launch into new geographies. It’s targeting the top 10 countries in aquaculture, including China and India.
According to the company’s latest impact report, eFishery has more than 6,000 fish and shrimp farmers from 250 cities in Indonesia in its ecosystem. The report also claims eFishery’s platform can boost farmer incomes by as much as 45% and that the total carbon footprint of its production is 92% lower than that of the meat industry. The company has also said it aims to have 1 million fish farmers as members of its “digital cooperative†by 2025 (agfundernews.com).
