What is the name of your organization?
Dottir Labs
What is the name of your solution?
Dottir Labs
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Dottir labs enables healthy and sustainable aquaculture with a novel optical sensor network, giving real-time data on of water quality and fish health
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Somerville, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
As of 2024, over half of all seafood people eat comes from aquaculture, and that number’s expected to double by 2050. But with wild fisheries in decline, even that won’t be enough to meet global nutrition needs. Recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) offer a promising path forward—they use less water, allow for tighter control, and can improve animal welfare.
The catch is that RAS are really sensitive to water quality. Waste compounds like ammonium and nitrate build up fast, stressing the fish and leading to disease and high mortality—sometimes as much as 30%. Keeping the system stable means constant monitoring, but the tools most farms have today are either manual, slow, or way too expensive to use at scale.
Globally, over 20 million people depend directly on aquaculture to make a living, and hundreds of millions rely on it for food. Without affordable, scalable ways to monitor water quality in real time, it’s hard for RAS to live up to their full potential—especially in places where resources are limited or farms are remote.
What is your solution?
Dottir Labs has developed a real-time water monitoring system for aquaculture, based on a novel implementation of Raman spectroscopy. Unlike traditional systems that rely on bulky, expensive lab equipment, our technology uses compact, low-cost sensors connected by standard optical fibers to a shared laser light source—making it feasible to deploy across large, real-world aquaculture facilities.
This sensor network provides broad spatial coverage while significantly reducing per-sensor cost, enabling continuous, non-destructive detection of key water quality components like ammonium, nitrate, nitrite, and CO₂. Machine learning models interpret the spectral data to quantify these compounds in both fresh and saltwater environments creating a complete monitoring, modeling and control infrastructure for a highly complex environment.
By bringing high-resolution chemical sensing out of the lab and into the water, our system gives aquaculture operators an automatic tool to reduce mortality and improve efficiency.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We serve communities in regions with limited access to fresh, local seafood—particularly those relying on land-based aquaculture for food production and livelihoods. These communities are underserved because current water monitoring tools are expensive, manual, and inaccessible, putting local farms at risk of failure. Our solution enables reliable, real-time water quality monitoring, helping farms operate more efficiently and avoid catastrophic losses. This strengthens access to nutritious seafood, supports local employment, and reduces pressure on overfished coastal ecosystems
