Earlier this week, the latest on TechCrunch The StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a chat that came back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a venture event: How do you know 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 makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon that fishermen install on their boats. The machine uses computer vision to scan each fish, identify its species and locate the brain. He then pierces the brain and cuts off the gills, so the fish dies without being beaten or suffocated.
This may not sound very compassionate, but it is much better than the alternative, which is a slow death of several minutes to an hour, flooding the fish with stress hormones and lactic acid, dulling the flavor and shortening the shelf life. All this is an automated, industrial-scale version power jimethe centuries-old Japanese technique is traditionally performed by trained fishermen on the dockside at the moment of fishing. By killing and draining the fish immediately, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the meat to age for days, sometimes longer, before serving. It’s this aging period that gives high-end sashimi its concentrated, umami-heavy flavor as enzymes slowly break down the muscles.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up fishing in the Middle East with his family, and Shinkei’s idea didn’t come from reading an essay in college by an animal rights philosopher titled “.If A Fish Could Scream.” His premise was that fish don’t have vocal cords, so the suffering most of them go through on the way to your plate is essentially invisible.
But Shinke’s ambitions went far beyond the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvester and processor that applies robotics and artificial intelligence throughout the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei Poseidon gives its machines to fishermen for free, then pays those fishermen a premium price for the fish they catch in a standard dock auction for the fish that come out of them. In return, Shinkei takes full ownership of the fish, rather than allowing the fishermen to sell the fish on the open market. Then the catch is sent to a 16,000-square-foot plant Shinkei purchased in Tacoma, Washington, where it is broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand. Ceremonysold as “ceremonial grade” fish.
By far, the most visible point of proof is on the menu at Erewhon, an influencer-favorite Los Angeles food chain. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Ceremony Grade Miso Black Cod, heated from the prepared food bar, and the marketing around it is based on the “sustainably caught, humanely harvested” framework. The arrangement is still a pilot, operating out of Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location for now and expanding to other stores depending on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to 50 Michelin-starred restaurants, claiming something unprecedented: Japan is importing American-caught fish into its fish markets, which has historically priced American seafood lower than local produce.
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, as many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, is still an open question, and even Khawaja says that’s secondary when explaining the company. The real selling point, he told the El Segundo crowd, is not the animal welfare story, but the practical story about quality. A catch that normally has 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 after it’s out of the water without any problems. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, attempts to quantify this by scanning fish and predicting the individual shelf life for each one. This is important in an industry where, according to Khawaja’s estimates, about 18% of the product is lost to spoilage between the dock and the store alone, before the retail loss is calculated.
This pernicious problem is intertwined with the details of the American seafood supply chain and surprises most people who haven’t worked there. A significant portion of the fish caught by U.S. boats in U.S. waters is frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, where it is laboriously gutted, gutted, scaled, and filleted before being shipped back for sale here. Industry estimates are as high as 90% of how much American seafood is imported, although about half of that, by some estimates, actually originates in domestic waters before making the trip overseas. The report blamed parts of China’s seafood processing sector, including forced labor Uighur workers in Shandong Province and North Korean workers In Liaoning, the system has become the target of US trade and labor inspections in recent years.
There has been a push within the industry to “rebuild” some of that processing, driven in part by tariffs and pandemic-era disruptions that have made travel to China less attractive. The bet Shinkei — and the Founders Fund — is making is that catching, killing, processing and distributing the entire chain under one roof in Tacoma can be done cost-effectively enough to surpass it.
The bet for the Founders Fund often follows a model that supports founders outside of fashion categories. Asparouhov, a mile-a-minute and reckless talker, made it clear to the attendees: There’s no one else on Earth who wants to waste their lives on fish-killing robots, and given the smell of Shinkey’s office, that’s no surprise. (We all laughed at the observation, though it narrows the field a bit. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese firm called Nichimo sells a fish-stunning device to help people perform manual ike jime, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish cutting and processing. Only one version of Shinkei is clear, only one working version of the technique. Scale in US boats.)
In fact, Asparouhov said the firm has deliberately kept its exposure to crowded categories such as general AI applications relatively low. By his math, AI and defense together account for 15% to 20% of the fund’s invested capital, far below what the firm considers typical elsewhere. Shinkei sits alongside New Zealand-based company Halter solar-powered, GPS-equipped cattle collars that allows farmers to drive cattle remotely and Ohalo GeneticsA crop-genetics company founded by David Friedberg, host of the All-In podcast, as proof that the firm’s appetite for food and agriculture is not a one-off.
Of course, the fund last title win it has nothing to do with fish. His early and aggressive bet on Elon Musk’s SpaceX — ties that stretch back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal — reportedly earned the firm tens of billions of dollars (one of the largest venture capital gains ever recorded). Asparouhov argued that the win would accelerate a broader shift toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the biggest companies on the Nasdaq no longer involve pure software, but complex electromechanical systems. He predicted that more SpaceX graduates would go on to build their own ambitious physical-world companies, flush with liquidity and working alongside Musk.
It will take time to tell if Shinkei will become one of the firm’s next big hits. A lot of bites. The company is a robot manufacturer, a seafood processor and a consumer brand, all at once, and each has its own challenges. Fishermen are used to working in a certain way. Distributors are built around decades old habits. Chefs and grocers still need to be convinced that the story of humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. That’s to say nothing of the salt water, fish guts and equipment that must survive life aboard a commercial ship, or that the product it sells is perishable, so there’s little room for a simple software company to stumble.
Still, chatting with the two together in El Segundo was enough to give viewers a sense of why the Founders Fund found the bet attractive. The firm doesn’t just think it’s found a founder who’s building something new in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry; he thinks it’s a company that almost no one in the US wants to start.
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