“Let’s talk about the status quo of fish today,” says Saif Khawaja, founder and CEO of Seremoni. “When you walk into any mass market retailer, the fish you’re buying there were killed by being brought onto the deck of the boat and left to flop around, hitting the deck, suffocating and asphyxiating.”
“The experience of stress, of not being able to breathe, floods the fish with cortisol, adrenaline, all these analogs to traditional human hormones related to stress. Then there is the lactic acid production, ammonia production. The blood is left to stagnate in their meat. All this allows bacteria to grow, which means you have this environment that’s primed for very rapid spoilage.”
The fish will get soggy and taste sour.
Seremoni, whose parent company is Shinkei Systems, of El Segundo, California, launched last year with a $7 M seed money round funded by Cantos, in order to solve that problem.
The idea was to synthesize ikejime, an ancient Japanese fishing technique, with proprietary AI-powered robotics, reinventing fish processing for a larger, more sustainable bottom line.
When Seremoni Fish launched, it transformed the seafood landscape by delivering Michelin-star quality fish directly to local grocers and premier restaurants: Boat-to-plate, with complete traceability.
“A strong motivating factor for me building the business,” says Khawaja, “is that wild-caught seafood is one of those systems that hasn’t been touched by modern intervention. Through the scaling of best-in-class systems, we could show people what we’ve all been missing out on.”
Of course, the big question, according to Khawaja, was, “How do we scale these artisanal fishing systems in a way that can create nutrition and also philosophical [benefits] for everybody,” and help restore our oceans while we do it?
In other words, how do we create an automation suite that “eliminates human headaches and multiplies profit margins” even as we treat the product – the fish – better and more regeneratively? And all this in an industry that survives on a knife’s edge margin:
Unit economics in the fishing industry have appeared to top out. But at the same time that we’ve all seen major innovations in tech coming to market in regenerative land-based agriculture, it seems that marine tech has lagged. With a few notable exceptions, why does fixing the fishing industry seem such an unsolvable problem to many experts?
Khawaja wondered whether it was possible to create a “reimagined supply chain of fish?”
Well, a major investor says of Khawaja: “ … he’s what we like to call a ‘Kool-Aid Man’. If you put a wall in front of him, there will be a Saif-shaped hole in it.”
It would take some thinking and tinkering to discover that shape.
Tradition & Change
“I remember the first time I went fishing,” says Khawaja, who describes himself as a “third-generation hobbyist fisherman.” “It was a huge trip with my family; all these cousins came. It was thirty or forty people, crammed into this tiny boat. We caught a bunch of fish, brought them back home, and had fish for dinner …”
“I remember it as a full family bonding type of experience.”
Ever since then, Khawaja has enjoyed bonding with his father on regular fishing trips. They started in Dubai, where Saif Khawaja grew up (his parents were born in rural Pakistan). “Really beautiful, father/son moments and conversations … my dad and I connected a lot, you know—I got close to him through that.”
On the “tiny farms” of his ancestors, relatives, and neighbors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Pakistan, says Khawaja, the goats and chickens can express their discomfort vocally. But the supposition that “fish can’t scream” has caused a tendency in humans to assume that fish don’t suffer and don’t feel pain. The idea, most notably promulgated by animal rights activist and Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer, influenced Khawaja into further study. He discovered that, in fact, fishes probably do feel pain, trauma, and stress. And unnecessarily so.
Rocking the Boat
Because about 3 billion people rely on fish as a primary source of protein, according to the United Nations, the level of mass misery that fish experience by conventional practices like line- and trap-catching is a global problem, Khawaja concluded. Now add to that the fact that only about 1 in 3 of those suffering fish make it to a plate in the US—and we have a full-blown tragedy, don’t we?
The problem was especially untenable for Khawaja, who’d grown up on a strict halal diet, which respects a tradition of harvesting animals for human consumption in the most humane way possible.
Finally, the conventional way fish are slaughtered leads to the quick formation of toxins and early spoilage—so all those suffering fish, only one-third of which we actually wind up eating, don’t even taste good! All that’s a recipe for disruption.
Resistance
But innovation is often a hard sell in such a perilous industry. Khawaja knows firsthand, having put his time in on a commercial fishing boat. “Twenty-five knot winds. Miles and miles offshore. If you fall off and the boat keeps going, you will not make it back. And the boat is pitching sixty, seventy, degrees each way. There are tons of sharp tools all around. You’re hoping none of the other deckhands will do anything crazy—and all these things just make it like a very intense and stressful environment.”
“Yet without that onboard experience,” says Khawaja, “it’s difficult for investors to muster the empathy necessary to viscerally understand the need for change in the industry.”
But once inside the industry, he argues, it’s also tough to get convinced that any change can make things better. It’s a “the devil you know” environment, where your primary concern is understandably not the fish dying quicker, lasting longer, tasting better—but you making it home to your family, by not introducing anything new and different. Commercial fishermen die at a rate 40+ times higher than the average worker in the US. And you’re asking them to trust you.
That trust is building rapidly. Seremoni is structured as a cooperative, intended to improve the lives of fishermen and their businesses. The cooperative seems to believe that a certain amount of the right kind of automation can improve the lives of fish and fishers. New tools can start to ameliorate the “litany of issues plaguing one of the largest agriculture sectors in the world,” according to Cantos’s Grant Gregory: “Overfishing, pollution, bycatch, spoilage, and even slavery comprise a few of the most rampant problems here.”
Says Khawaja, “By profit-sharing with producers, the price that chefs and consumers pay is proportional to the price fishers receive, incentivizing delicate quality and care.”
A god of the briny depths
Seremoni’s major innovation – and flagship entry into the industry – is Poseidon, a groundbreaking tool that automates the ikejime process for a variety of fish species and sizes. The best part is that Poseidon can be retrofitted directly onto existing fishing vessels.
“By ensuring precise and efficient fish harvesting,” says Khawaja, Poseidon enables fishers to increase revenue without expanding their quota.”
How? The tools maximize the value of each catch by delivering consistently high-quality fish—and thereby significantly reducing waste, Khawaja says. That should also directly improve the relative safety onboard. It implies not taking more risks, not going out farther, and not staying out longer. Especially by slowing things down in “an industry that operates on hours and minutes: If you can turn that to days, sometimes even weeks, ideally, then it goes a long way towards being more sustainable,” Khawaja says.
Astoundingly, the Poseidon robot uses cutting-edge AI, machine learning, motor control, and clean-sheet mechanism design to help the industry achieve that ambitious mission.
With automated ikejime, “there are more optimal brain and bleed techniques,” that are not unlike kosher and halal techniques, says Khawaja. The technique originated in Japan but is now in widespread use. It involves the insertion of a spike quickly and directly into the fish’s hindbrain, which leads to instant brain death. Then, a thin needle or piece of wire is inserted into the spinal column to prevent any further muscle movement. This causes the fins to relax, which arrests all motion—it stops the flopping. When the reflex actions are prevented, those muscle movements that ultimately cause the quick spoilage don’t occur.
The machine is neither fragile nor subject to damage from harsh marine conditions, says Khawaja. It was engineered to thrive at sea with special corrosion resistance, thermal management, and structural and electrical durability.
Khawaja gathered an international squad of mechanical, perceptual, and software engineers from heralded companies such as SpaceX, Anduril, and Relativity. He introduced fishing- and food industry experts from Michelin Star restaurants and seafood distribution giants.
Each Poseidon unit is even connected directly to the Starlink system.
The team on the ground includes Reed Ginsberg (Cofounder & CTO), Jennifer Isaza (Software Lead), and Waiman Meinhold, Ph.D (Mechanical Lead). But, at the helm remains Saif Khawaja, a quarter-century-old captain of a brand new industry standard: Seremoni-Grade.