Earlier this week, in the latest edition of TechCrunch Strictly VC Event in Los Angeles, Shinkei Systems Founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down to chat and returned to a question that doesn’t usually come up in a risk event: How do you know if a fish is stressed?
It’s a fair question for Khawaja, as 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 stir or suffocate.
That may not sound as compassionate, but it’s much better than the alternative, which is a slow death lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, flooding the fish with stress hormones and lactic acid, dulling the flavor and shortening the shelf life. All of this is an industrial-scale automated version of power jimea centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally practiced by trained fishermen on the dock at the time of catch. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the meat to safely age for days, sometimes longer, before serving. That aging period is what gives premium sashimi its concentrated, umami-rich flavor, as enzymes slowly break down the muscle.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware release. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family in the Middle East, and the idea of Shinkei didn’t click until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If fish could scream.” Their premise was that fish lack vocal cords, so the suffering that most of them experience on the way to the plate is essentially invisible.
But Shinkei’s ambitions have expanded far beyond the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish processor and processor, deploying robotics and artificial intelligence throughout the chain, from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free and then pays them a premium price for the fish that comes out of them, far above what would be fetched for the catch at a standard port auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full possession of the fish instead of letting fishermen sell it on the open market. The catch is then sent to a 16,000-square-foot plant that Shinkei purchased in Tacoma, Washington, where it is broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand. Ceremonymarketed as “ceremony grade” fish.
The most visible proof so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles supermarket chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni-grade miso black cod, fresh from the convenience counter, and the marketing around it leans heavily on the “sustainably caught and humanely harvested” framework. The deal remains a pilot and is running for now at Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location, with a broader rollout to other stores depending on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants with a total of 50 Michelin stars, making a claim that has reportedly never happened before: Japan imports American-caught fish to its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as clearly inferior to the domestic product.
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely slaughtered” fish, as many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, remains an open question, and even Khawaja says it’s secondary in explaining the company. He told the El Segundo crowd that the real selling point is not so much the story of animal welfare but the practice around quality. A catch that might normally have a shelf life of 5 to 7 days can be extended to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after coming out of the water without problems. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, attempts to quantify this by scanning the fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each one. That’s important in an industry where, according to Khawaja’s estimates, about 18% of product is lost to spoilage right between the dock and the store, even before counting losses at retail.
That spoilage problem is related to a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A significant proportion of the fish caught in American waters by American vessels is frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive work of heading, gutting, shelling and filleting, and then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates of the amount of American seafood imported are as high as 90%, although about half of that amount, by some estimates, actually originated in domestic waters before making the 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 labor in Liaoning, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor scrutiny in recent years.
There has been a push within the industry to “offshor” some of that processing, driven in part by tariffs and pandemic-era disruptions that made round-trip travel to China less attractive. The bet Shinkei (and Founders Fund) are making is that reorienting the entire chain—capture, kill, processing and distribution, all under one roof in Tacoma—can be done profitably enough to outperform it.
For Founders Fund, the bet fits a pattern, which is to back founders who often fall outside of trendy categories. Asparouhov, who speaks a mile a minute and without reservation, put it clearly to the audience: There is practically no one else on Earth who wants to spend their life in fish-killing robots, and given the smell of the Shinkei office, it is not surprising. (We all laughed at the observation, although it underestimates the field a bit. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese company called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to help humans perform ike jime manually, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish slaughter and processing. Shinkei’s apparent advantage, for now, is being the only one running the fully automated version of the technique at scale on American ships.)
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 between 15% and 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimated is typical at other venture firms. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company that manufactures solar-powered, GPS-equipped livestock collars which allowed ranchers to herd cattle remotely, and Ohalo Geneticsthe crop genetics company founded by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as proof that the company’s appetite for food and agriculture is not exceptional.
Of course, the background Recent headline-grabbing victory It has nothing to do with fish. His early, aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX (a relationship dating back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal) are reported to have generated many tens of billions of dollars for the company (it’s one of the largest venture outcomes ever recorded). Asparouhov argued that winning will accelerate a broader shift in risk toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of Nasdaq’s largest companies today already involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted that more SpaceX students, flush with cash and trained by working alongside Musk, will start their own ambitious ventures in the physical world.
It will take time to know if Shinkei will become one of the company’s next big wins. It’s very bitten. The company is a robotics manufacturer, a seafood processor, and a consumer brand, all running at the same time and each with their own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working in a certain way. Dealers rely on decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery shoppers have yet to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying extra for. That doesn’t mean anything about the hardware, which has to survive salt water, fish guts, and life on a commercial ship, or that the product it sells is perishable, so there’s little room for the kind of stumbles that a simple software company can ignore.
Still, speaking with the two together in El Segundo was enough for the audience to understand why Founders Fund finds the bet attractive. The company not only believes it has found a founder building something new in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry; He believes it’s the kind of company that almost no one in the United States wants to build.
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