Earlier this week, in TechCrunch’s newest StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles, Shinkei Systems Founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a discussion that kept coming back to a question not usually asked at a venture event: How do you tell if a fish is stressed?
It’s a fair question for Khawaja, as his company, Shinkei, has built its entire business around the answer. Shinkei builds a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon that fishermen install on their boats. The machine scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species and locates the brain. It then pierces the brain and cuts the gills, so the fish dies before it can strike or suffocate.
It may not sound so compassionate, but it is much better than the alternative, which is a slow death in minutes to an hour that floods the fish with stress hormones and lactic acid, which dulls the taste and reduces shelf life. The whole thing is an automated, industrial-scale version of it like Jimea centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally performed on the dock by trained fishermen at the time of fishing. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decay long enough for the flesh to safely age for days, sometimes longer, before it is served. This aging period is what gives prime sashimi its concentrated, heavy umami flavor, as enzymes slowly break down the muscles.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family in the Middle East, and the idea for Shinkei didn’t hit him until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If fish could scream.” His hypothesis was that fish have no vocal cords, so the discomfort most experience on the way to your plate is virtually invisible.
But Shinkei’s ambitions have extended far beyond the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvesting and processing machine, deploying robotics and artificial intelligence throughout the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei gives the Poseidon machines to fishermen for free and then pays those fishermen a premium price for the fish that come out of them, well above what the catch would fetch in a typical dock auction. In return, Shinkei owns the fish outright instead of letting the fishermen sell them on the open market. The catch is then shipped to a 16,000-square-foot factory that Shinkei purchased in Tacoma, Washington, where it is broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand. Ceremonymarketed as ‘ceremonial grade’ fish.
The most visible proof point so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Ceremony Grade Miso Black Cod, hot off the prepared food bar, and the marketing around it leans hard on the “caught, humanely harvested” frame. The deal is still a pilot, currently running out of Erewhon’s location in Manhattan Beach, with a wider rollout to other stores depending on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants that hold a combined 50 Michelin stars, and is claiming something it says has never been done before: Japan is importing American-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as clearly inferior to the domestic product.
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, as many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, remains an open question, and even Khawaja says it’s secondary when explaining the company. He told the El Segundo crowd that the real selling point is not so much the animal welfare story as the quality practice. A fish that might normally have a shelf life of 5 to 7 days can be stretched to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks out of the water without a problem. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, attempts to quantify this by scanning fish and projecting an individual lifespan for each. That matters in an industry where, Khawaja estimates, about 18% of product is lost to spoilage right between dock and warehouse, before retail losses are even counted.
This spoilage problem is entangled with a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A significant share of fish caught in US waters by US vessels is frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive operations of head, gutting, scaling and filleting, and then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates of how much US seafood is imported run as high as 90%, although about half of that, by some estimates, actually came from domestic waters before making the round trip overseas. Reports have linked parts of China’s seafood processing industry to forced labor, including Uighur workers in Shandong Province and North Korea work in Liaoning, making the system a target of US trade and labor control in recent years.
There has been a push within the industry to “re-establish” some of that processing, spurred in part by tariffs and pandemic-era holidays that have made the round trip to China less attractive. The bet Shinkei – and Founders Fund – is making is that bringing the entire chain back together, catching, killing, processing and distribution, all under one roof in Tacoma, can become profitable enough to surpass it.
For the Founders Fund, the bet fits a pattern, supporting founders who often fall outside of trendy categories. Asparouhov, who speaks a mile a minute and without reservation, made it clear to the audience: there is virtually no one else on Earth who wants to spend their lives on fish-killing robots, and given the smell of Shinkei’s office, it’s no wonder. (We all laughed at the remark, though it doesn’t sell the field a bit. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese company called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to help people perform ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane butchering and processing fish on a scale on American boats.)
In fact, Asparouhov said the company intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories like general AI applications relatively low. By his math, AI and defense together account for about 15% to 20% of the fund’s capital, well below what he estimated is typical elsewhere in the business. Shinkei sits next to Halter, a New Zealand-founded company that makes GPS-equipped solar-powered cattle collars that allow ranchers to herd cattle remotely and Ohalo Geneticsthe genetic crop company started by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as proof that the company’s appetite for food and agriculture is not a one-off.
Of course, the fund impressive recent win it has nothing to do with fish. Its early and aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX — a relationship that goes back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal — are reported to have generated many tens of billions of dollars for the company (it’s one of the biggest business results ever recorded). Asparouhov argued that the win would accelerate a broader shift in the venture toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the biggest companies on the Nasdaq today already involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted that more SpaceX graduates, flush and shaped by working alongside Musk, would go on to found their own ambitious physical-world companies.
Whether Shinkei will become one of the company’s next big wins will take time to tell. It is very bitten. The company is a robotics manufacturer and processor of seafood and a consumer brand, all operating simultaneously and each with its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working in a certain way. Distributors are built around decades of habits. Chefs and grocers still need to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. That’s to say nothing of the hardware, which has to survive salt water, fish guts and life on a commercial vessel, or that the product it’s selling is perishable, so there’s little room for the kind of stumbling a simple software company might stumble.
However, talking with the two together in El Segundo was enough to make the audience understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The company doesn’t just think it’s found a founder building something new in an unexpectedly dysfunctional industry. he believes it’s the kind of company that almost no one else in the United States even wants to build.
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