CV and robotics to automate quality inspection in fish farms
OctaPulse uses AI vision to automate hatchery QA for fish farms, starting with broodstock phenotyping and juvenile deformity inspection. We cut inspection time from about 5 minutes to under 30 seconds per fish, with more than 90 percent accuracy, so farms advance only high quality fish and waste less feed and labor. Our goal is to bring automation across the entire fish production lifecycle for the $300B aquaculture industry.
Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector, and has already surpassed commercial fishing for production of seafood. Yet two of the most critical QA and QC steps in fish production are still done by hand: phenotyping and deformity inspection. These processes are slow, error prone, and despised by technicians but vital for the success of the farm, so much so that farms spend >$200K a year on trained technicians and geneticists to operate. We’ve built an AI vision platform for vertically integrated finfish farms that drops into existing workflows starting in the hatchery, uses off the shelf cameras, standardizes these QA steps, and creates a proprietary multi species dataset that becomes the brain for future autonomous aquafarms. Phenotyping is the start, but the platform is designed to be a drop in solution that can easily expand into feeding, health monitoring, and processing so we can solve production problems across the lifecycle.
We signed a 6-figure paid pilot with the largest trout producer in the United States, are deploying into 2 more farms early 2026, and trained models above 90 percent accuracy while cutting inspection time from 5 minutes to under 30 seconds. Each deployment adds labeled images to our dataset and improves cross species generalization.
Total raised
$500K
Last stage
Pre-seed
Investors
Rohan Singh
Co-founder and CTO of OctaPulse, deploying computer vision, edge computing, and robotics to make fish farms autonomous. Former D1 tennis player at Texas A&M, CMU AI Engineering MS, with production robotics and software experience across Tesla, Nvidia, ASML, and Toyota.
Paul L. Grech
CMU Robotics Institute Pathways Fellow; former Bloomberg LP enterprise sales; Future Leader in the National Fisheries Institute and Coalition for Sustainable Aquaculture.
LinkedInAndres Castrillon
GEM Fellow with an underwater robotics background, originally from Colombia. Met co-founders through CMU. Confirmed as co-founder in CMU VentureBridge and McGinnis Venture Competition records.
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