Earlier this week, during the latest TechCrunch StrictlyVC Event in Los Angeles, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a conversation that kept coming back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a corporate event: How do you know if a fish is stressed?
It’s a legitimate question for Khawaja to ask, since 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 scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species and locates the brain. It then pierces the brain and severs the gills, so the fish dies before it can struggle or suffocate.
That may not sound so compassionate, but it’s much better than the alternative, which is a slow death over a few minutes to an hour that floods the fish with stress hormones and lactic acid, dulling flavor and shortening shelf life. The whole thing is an automated, industrial-scale version of power jimea centuries-old Japanese technique, traditionally practiced at the dock by skilled fishermen at the time of capture. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough so that the flesh can age safely for days, sometimes longer, before being served. This aging period is what gives prime sashimi its concentrated, umami-rich flavor, as the enzymes slowly break down the muscle.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family to the Middle East, and the idea for Shinkei didn’t come about until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher called “”If fish could scream.” His premise was that fish don’t have vocal cords, so the suffering most of them endure on the way to your plate is essentially invisible.
But Shinkei’s ambitions go far beyond being a killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fisherman and fish processor, deploying robotics and AI throughout the chain, from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free, then pays them a higher price for the fish that comes out of them, well above what the catch could fetch in a standard dockside auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full ownership of the fish rather than letting the fishermen sell them on the open market. The plugs are then shipped to a 16,000-square-foot factory purchased by Shinkei in Tacoma, Wash., where they are broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand, Ceremonymarketed as “ceremonial quality” fish.
The most visible evidence so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain popular with influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni-grade miso black cod, fresh off the prepared food bar, and the marketing around it leans heavily on the “sustainably caught and humanely harvested” framework. The deal is still a pilot project, operating out of Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location for now, with a wider rollout to other stores depending on the quality of its sales. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants with a total of 50 Michelin stars, and asserts something that has apparently never happened before: Japan imports U.S.-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as significantly 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 business. He told the El Segundo audience that the real selling point was not so much the animal welfare story as the practicality of quality. A catch that would normally have a shelf life of 5 to 7 days can extend to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after it came out of the water without problems. Shinkei’s latest product, a plant-integrated sensor system, attempts to quantify this by scanning fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each. This is important in an industry where, by Khawaja’s estimate, about 18 percent of product is lost to spoilage just between dock and store, even before retail losses are counted.
This spoilage problem is linked to a detail of the U.S. seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked there. A significant portion of the fish caught in U.S. waters by U.S. boats is frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive work of heading, gutting, scaling and filleting, then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates for the amount of imported U.S. seafood are as high as 90 percent, although about half, by some estimates, actually came from domestic waters before making a round trip overseas. Reports have linked parts of China’s seafood processing sector to forced labor, including Uyghur workers in Shandong province and North Korean work in Liaoning, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor surveillance in recent years.
There has been a push within the industry to “reshore” some of this transformation, spurred in part by tariffs and pandemic-related disruptions that have made traveling back and forth to China less attractive. The bet Shinkei – and Founders Fund – are making is that relocating the entire chain, capturing, killing, processing and distributing, all under one roof in Tacoma, can be done cost-effectively enough to surpass it.
For Founders Fund, the bet is part of a model of supporting founders who often fall outside of trendy categories. Asparouhov, speaking at full speed and without reservation, made it clear to the participants: There is hardly anyone else on Earth who wants to spend their lives on robots that kill fish, and given the smell of the Shinkei office, that’s no wonder. (We all laughed at this observation, although it understates the field a bit. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese company called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to help humans perform the ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane slaughter and processing of fish. Shinkei’s apparent advantage, for now, is that it is the only one using the fully automated version of the technique on a large scale on boats Americans.)
In fact, Asparouhov said the company intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories such as generic AI applications relatively low. By his calculations, AI and defense together represent about 15% to 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimates is typical elsewhere in the venture capital industry. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company that manufactures solar-powered and GPS-equipped cattle collars which allowed breeders to keep livestock at a distance, and Ohalo Geneticsthe plant genetics company launched by David Friedberg, co-host of the “All-In” podcast, as proof that the company’s appetite for food and agriculture is not one-off.
Of course, the fund recent headline-grabbing victory has nothing to do with fish. His early aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX – a relationship that dates back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal – reportedly generated tens of billions of dollars for the company (it’s one of the biggest corporate results on record). Asparouhov argued that the victory would accelerate a broader shift toward businesses in the hardware and physical world, noting that most of the largest companies listed on Nasdaq already involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted that more SpaceX alumni, blessed with cash and shaped by working alongside Musk, will go on to create their own ambitious companies in the physical world.
It will take time to know whether Shinkei will become one of the company’s next big victories. It’s a lot of bite. The company is a robotics manufacturer, seafood processor and consumer brand, all operating at once and each with its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working in a certain way. Distributors are built around decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery shoppers 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 must survive salt water, fish intestines and life on a commercial boat, or the fact that the product it sells is perishable, so there’s little room for the kind of stumble that a simple software company can overlook.
Still, chatting with the two together in El Segundo was enough to make the audience understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The company not only believes it has found a founder who is building something new in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry; he thinks it’s the kind of company that almost no one else in the United States wants to build.
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