A change in the tides

• Indonesia is home to over ten tech unicorns, including 500-backed Bukalapak. With a population of over 280 million and 17,000+ islands, the world’s largest archipelagic country is still burgeoning with potential.
• One company hoping to make a splash as one of the country’s next unicorns is 500-backed eFishery. Earlier this year, the company raised US$90M, the largest round of funding in the world by an aquaculture tech startup, according to the team.
• “99% of the investors that we approached when we started out rejected us because our focus constituted such unfamiliar territory,” said Co-founder & CEO Gibran Huzaifah.
• eFishery has started expanding overseas, recently completing a pilot in Vietnam, and is now testing in Thailand and India.
• It all started when Gibran himself was a fish farmer. He had a dream of growing from one farm to thousands, but he quickly ran into a roadblock: the inefficiency of manual feeding. He soon realized he wasn’t alone, and that this is a problem many fish farmers face.
• And so, eFishery was born. He built a prototype smart feeder that communicated via smartphone to enable farmers to feed their fish remotely. This was a game-changer. Improved efficiency translated into more productivity, and ultimately, better income for fish farmers.
• Today, eFishery serves over 62,000 fish and shrimp farmers across 234 districts in Indonesia. The company’s integrated platform also provides access to feeds and offers a marketplace for the distribution of produce.
• Gibran knew that in order to scale eFishery’s business, he would need farmers to scale their farms too. This is when he encountered another roadblock — poor access to working capital across the aquaculture supply chain.
• Farmers only get paid when their fish is harvested, and typically this process takes three to four months. This makes taking out a traditional loan difficult. So, he sought to pioneer a more efficient way to provide working capital to farmers, and launched eFishery’s financial services.
• So, given all their success, is an IPO in the cards for eFishery? “As with all IPOs, it’s about market timing and external factors. But we have certain milestones that we are targeting first, like business expansion,” Gibran revealed.
• Read the full story on FinanceAsia.