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Launch HN: OctaPulse (YC W26) – Robotics and computer vision for fish farming
Hi HN! My name is Rohan and, together with Paul, I’m the co-founder of OctaPulse (https://www.tryoctapulse.com/). We’re building a robotics layer for seafood production, starting with automated fish inspection. We are currently deployed at our first production site with the largest trout producer in North America.
You might be wondering how the heck we got into this with no background in aquaculture or the ocean industry. We are both from coastal communities. I am from Goa, India and Paul is from Malta and Puerto Rico. Seafood is deeply tied to both our cultures and communities. We saw firsthand the damage being done to our oceans and how wild fish stocks are being fished to near extinction. We also learned that fish is the main protein source for almost 55% of the world's population. Despite it not being huge consumption in America it is massive globally. And then we found out that America imports 90% of its seafood. What? That felt absurd. That was the initial motivation for starting this company.
Paul and I met at an entrepreneurship happy hour at CMU. We met to talk about ocean tech. It went on for three hours. I was drawn to building in the ocean because it is one of the hardest engineering domains out there. Paul had been researching aquaculture for months and kept finding the same thing: a $350B global industry with less data visibility than a warehouse. After that conversation we knew we wanted to work on this together.
Hatcheries, the early stage on-land part of production, are full of labor intensive workflows that are perfect candidates for automation. Farmers need to measure their stock for feeding, breeding, and harvest decisions but fish are underwater and get stressed when handled. Most farms still sample manually. They net a few dozen fish, anesthetize them, place them on a table to measure one by one, and extrapolate to populations of hundreds of thousands. It takes about 5 minutes per fish and the data is sparse.
When we saw this process we were ba
