AquaSense

OctaPulse

AquaSense

Automating fish inspection with AI to reduce waste, boost hatchery efficiency, and enable sustainable aquaculture

Pittsburgh, PA, USA

United States

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

Overfishing has pushed wild fish stocks to the brink of collapse, threatening ocean ecosystems, biodiversity, and food security for over 3 billion people who rely on seafood as a primary protein source. As demand continues to rise and land-based agriculture faces constraints from drought and development, aquaculture has become essential. However, hatcheries—the foundation of aquaculture—are struggling to scale due to inefficient, manual inspection processes that determine which juvenile fish are healthy enough to grow out. This bottleneck limits farm productivity and results in costly waste. For example, at Blue Ocean Mariculture, the largest offshore finfish farm in the U.S., inspecting 400,000 juvenile fish takes up to 10 days and 7–10 technicians per cohort. This stressful process lowers accuracy and increases mortality, contributing to hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable losses per farm. Globally, the aquaculture industry is valued at $313 billion and growing. Yet without automation and data-driven tools, hatcheries remain labor-bound, inefficient, and unable to meet rising demand. Our solution addresses this bottleneck by automating juvenile fish inspection, improving survivability, reducing waste, and increasing profitability—unlocking scalable, sustainable aquaculture while easing pressure on ocean ecosystems.

Our solution is AquaSense, an AI-powered inspection system that automates the grading of juvenile fish in hatcheries. This process, traditionally done by hand, is slow, labor-intensive, and prone to human error—leading to wasted resources, fish stress, and lost revenue. AquaSense combines high-resolution cameras with advanced computer vision to analyze each fish in real time as it passes through a modular inspection unit. The system instantly detects deformities or signs of poor health with over 90% accuracy, compared to under 70% from manual inspection. A tablet interface provides immediate feedback, showing hatchery staff whether a fish is healthy and giving insight into overall cohort health. By automating this essential but outdated process, AquaSense helps farms reduce labor costs, prevent feed waste, and improve fish survivability. The system also creates detailed datasets that enable farms to track trends, improve breeding, and make more informed decisions over time. AquaSense not only improves farm efficiency—it helps unlock the scalable, sustainable growth aquaculture needs to meet global seafood demand. As the system trains on more species and environments, it becomes more powerful, enabling wider adoption across hatcheries and recirculating aquaculture systems worldwide.

Our solution directly serves hatchery managers, aquaculture technicians, and mid-to-large finfish farms operating in offshore and recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS). These teams are responsible for grading juvenile fish to ensure only healthy stock moves into the grow-out phase, where 70% of operational costs are spent on feed. Yet today, this process is manual, exhausting, and inconsistent—requiring 7–10 technicians up to 10 days to inspect a single 400,000-fish cohort. It’s stressful for workers, harmful to fish, and leads to lost revenue from missed deformities or early mortalities. Hatchery staff are underserved by technology. Most tools focus on later farm stages, leaving hatcheries with outdated, labor-intensive methods. AquaSense empowers them with automation, accuracy, and real-time data, reducing physical strain and improving outcomes. This solution has ripple effects far beyond the farm. With a rising global population and shrinking farmland, aquaculture is essential for food security. Overfishing has pushed wild fish stocks to the brink of collapse, and aquaculture now produces over 50% of the world’s seafood. To avoid ecosystem collapse, farms must scale sustainably. AquaSense enables that scale—improving farm efficiency, profitability, and resilience while reducing pressure on ocean ecosyste