Indonesia-based aquaculture tech company DELOS today announced that it has raised an undisclosed seed funding led by Arise, a collaborative fund from MDI Ventures and Finch Capital.
The funding round also included the participation of MDI Ventures; Number Capital; iSeed Asia; Irvan Kolonas of JAPFA, one of the largest shrimp feed and seed producers in the country; and Hendra Kwik of fintech firm PayFazz.
DELOS planned to use the new funding to reinforce and scale its shrimp production software which forecasts and recommends actions to improve farm profitability and productivity. It will also be used to develop value chain integrations and onboard new DELOS farm partners.
The company was founded by Guntur Mallarangeng, Bobby Indra Gunawan, and Alexander Farthing in 2021. It was founded with the background of the potential growth of Indonesia’s shrimp industry which was hampered by challenges such as low adoption of technology, sub-par management practices, and poor access to financing.
“These factors have created a bottleneck within the midstream of the value chain, and are throttling the output of downstream processors to an average of 40 to 60 per cent capacity,” the company wrote in a statement. “This productivity gap is what is keeping a US$2 billion industry from fulfilling its latent potential and becoming a US$4 billion industry. The value chain is ready for farm productivity to increase.”
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DELOS aims to tackle these challenges with its full-stack farm management system, built to help increase the productive capacity and output of existing Indonesian shrimp farms by 50 to 150 per cent – creating value for farmers, increasing national export volumes, and growing Indonesia’s reputation as a world-leading aquaculture nation.
The startup has teamed up with Dewi Laut Aquaculture, a local aquaculture company, and Alune Aqua, a leading aquaculture fintech firm, to accelerate the development of in-house technologies.
“Classic challenges in the multi-layer value chain, low productivity, and lack of financing hinder the archipelago’s untapped shrimp industry that makes up 77 per cent out of the overall fishery output values. DELOS tech-enabled solution has managed to immerse the tech and the ops into local farmers’ culture and infrastructure while bridging them with the incumbent stakeholders. It leads to higher FCR (Feed Conversion Ratio), SR (Survival Rate), and Harvest, making it such a killer flywheel,” commented Aldi Adrian Hartanto, Partner of Arise.
DELOS is the latest Indonesian aquaculture startup that has raised external funding, apart from eFishery, Jala, and Aruna.
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Image Credit: DELOS
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