Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in El Segundo, a question that rarely surfaces at a venture gathering took center stage: How do you know if a fish is stressed out? For Saif Khawaja, founder of Shinkei Systems, it’s the central question his company was built to answer.
Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot, Poseidon, that fishermen install on their boats. The machine scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species, and locates the brain. Within seconds of the fish coming out of the water, it pierces the brain and severs the gills, so the fish dies before it can thrash or suffocate. A slow death floods the meat with stress hormones and lactic acid, dulling flavor and shortening shelf life.
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The process is an automated, industrial-scale version of ike jime, a centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally performed dockside by trained fishermen. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the flesh to be safely aged for days, sometimes longer, before it’s served. That aging period is what gives top-tier sashimi its concentrated, umami-heavy flavor.
From an animal rights essay to a hardware startup
Khawaja’s origin story is unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up fishing with his family in the Middle East, but the idea for Shinkei didn’t click until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If Fish Could Scream.” Its premise: fish lack vocal cords, so the suffering most experience on the way to the plate is essentially invisible. Conventional commercial fishing lets fish suffocate on deck, a process that can take from a few minutes to roughly an hour, releasing stress compounds that shorten shelf life and dull flavor.
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But Shinkei’s ambitions have expanded well past the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvester and processor, deploying robotics and AI across the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free, then pays them a premium price for the fish that come out of them, well above what the catch would fetch at a standard dock auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full possession of the fish. The catch then ships to a 16,000-square-foot plant Shinkei bought in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand, Seremoni, marketed as “ceremony grade” fish.
The most visible proof point so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni Grade Miso Black Cod, hot off the prepared-foods bar, and the marketing leans hard on the “sustainably caught, humanely harvested” framing. The arrangement is still a pilot at the Manhattan Beach location, with wider rollout contingent on sales.
Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants holding a combined 50 Michelin stars, and claims something that has reportedly never happened before: Japan importing American-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as inferior.
The practical pitch: less spoilage, longer shelf life
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, the way many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, is still an open question. Khawaja treats it as secondary to the practical pitch. A catch that might normally have a 5-to-7-day shelf life can stretch to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after coming out of the water with no issue.
Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, tries to quantify that by scanning fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each one. That matters in an industry where, by Khawaja’s estimate, roughly 18% of product is lost to spoilage just between dock and store, before retail loss is even counted.
That spoilage problem is tangled up with a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A meaningful share of fish caught in U.S. waters by U.S. boats gets 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 of how much American seafood is imported run as high as 90%, though roughly half of that, by some estimates, actually originated in domestic waters before making the round trip abroad. Reporting has tied parts of China’s seafood processing sector to forced labor, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor scrutiny in recent years. The bet that Shinkei — and Founders Fund — are making is that reshoring the entire chain, catch, kill, process, and distribute, all under one roof in Tacoma, can be done profitably enough to outcompete it.
Why Founders Fund placed the bet
For Founders Fund, the wager fits a pattern the firm has leaned into for years: backing founders who are often outside of fashionable categories. Partner Delian Asparouhov, who spoke at the event, put it plainly: there’s essentially nobody else on Earth who wants to spend their life on robots that kill fish, and the smell of the office makes that clear enough. (It was a very funny line, though it undersells the field a little. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese firm called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to assist humans performing ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish slaughter.) Shinkei’s edge, for now, is being the only one running the fully automated version of the technique at scale on U.S. boats.
Asparouhov said the firm intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories like generic AI applications relatively low. By his rough math, AI and defense together account for something like 15% to 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimated is typical elsewhere in venture. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company making solar-powered, GPS-equipped cattle collars, and Ohalo Genetics, the crop-genetics company started by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as evidence that the firm’s appetite for food and agriculture isn’t a one-off.
Of course, the fund’s headline-grabbing recent win has nothing to do with fish. Its early and aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX are reported to have generated tens of billions of dollars for the firm. Asparouhov argued that win has accelerated a broader shift in venture toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the largest companies on the Nasdaq today involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted more of SpaceX’s alumni, flush with liquidity and shaped by working alongside Musk, will go on to start their own ambitious physical-world companies.
Whether Shinkei becomes one of the firm’s next big wins will take time to know. The company is a robotics manufacturer and a seafood processor and a consumer brand, all running at once, and each layer has its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working a certain way. Distributors are built around decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery buyers still have to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. The hardware has to survive saltwater, fish guts, and life on a commercial boat, and the product it’s selling spoils, so there’s little room for the kind of stumble a software company can usually shrug off.
Still, talking with the two together in El Segundo was enough to understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The firm thinks it has found a founder building something novel in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry — the kind of company almost nobody else in the United States even wants to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ike jime?
Ike jime is a centuries-old Japanese technique for killing fish instantly by piercing the brain and severing the gills, which prevents stress hormones from degrading the meat and allows for longer aging.
How does Shinkei’s robot work?
Shinkei’s Poseidon robot uses computer vision to identify the species and locate the brain of a fish, then pierces it and severs the gills within seconds of the fish being caught, automating the ike jime process.
Why is Founders Fund investing in a fish-killing robot?
Founders Fund sees Shinkei as a novel, hardware-heavy bet in a large, inefficient industry, fitting its pattern of backing founders building physical-world businesses in unfashionable categories.
Does Shinkei only make the robot?
No, Shinkei is vertically integrated: it gives robots to fishermen, buys the catch at a premium, processes the fish at its Tacoma plant, and sells it under its own consumer brand, Seremoni.
Where can I buy Shinkei’s fish?
Shinkei’s fish is currently available as Seremoni Grade Miso Black Cod at the Erewhon grocery store in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, and it supplies restaurants holding a combined 50 Michelin stars.
