Exclusive: Indonesia’s eFishery nets $90m series C from Temasek, SoftBank, Sequoia

Indonesian startup eFishery has raised a series C funding round of US$90 million, which marks the largest-ever VC financing for an aquaculture startup globally.

The round, which is also the biggest for a Southeast Asian agritech startup, was co-led by Temasek Holdings, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors including Go-Ventures, The Northstar Group, Wavemaker Partners, and Aqua-Spark also participated in the round.

In an exclusive interview with Tech in Asia, eFishery co-founder and CEO Gibran Huzaifah said that the proceeds will be used to strengthen the company’s existing ecosystem as it aims to become a “digital cooperative” for fish farmers.

Gibran Huzaifah, CEO and Co-founder of eFishery / Photo credit: eFishery

“We want to have 1 million fish farmers as members of the cooperative by 2025,” he shares. The company currently has 30,000 fish farmers on its platform.

The fresh capital will go towards eFishery’s international expansion plans, having piloted the project for a couple of years. The company expects to have a commercial presence in as many as 10 different countries by 2025.

Founded in 2013 in the city of Bandung, the startup entered the market with an IoT device called eFishery Feeder, which enables automated feeding in fish and shrimp farms. Farmers can then monitor and schedule  feeding via a smartphone app. The device also collects data on farm production patterns and fish behavior.

Having access to this valuable data has helped eFishery create a host of other solutions. It now makes money from three main revenue sources: the feeder device, which farmers can rent for 5,000 rupiah (about US$0.35) a day; eFishery Mall, a marketplace for selling fish and shrimp feed; and eFishery Fresh, which allows the company to sell fresh fish and shrimp to B2B customers such as restaurants, export buyers, and wholesale traders.

The company’s business model serves a vast market: Indonesia’s aquaculture production volume reached 15.1 million metric tons in 2019. EFishery says it has achieved positive EBITDA since 2020.

Unchallenged growth

Interestingly, profitability did not come at the expense of topline growth for eFishery. The company says it has scaled its network tenfold since its last funding round in 2020, and the number of farmers in its ecosystem has increased 1,248% over the last year.

Among the main contributing factors is its almost zero competition in Indonesia’s aquaculture space. This is surprising, considering the enormous opportunity that the industry holds. The country taps into only 8% of its aquaculture potential.

While other startups in the maritime and fisheries industry exist – like East Ventures-backed Aruna, for example – none of them provide aquaculture-focused solutions.

When asked why he thinks no other startup has shown interest in the field, the CEO quips that it is a “hard sector that requires hard solutions and hard work.”

Big fish in more ponds