Indonesian aquaculture startup DELOS raises $8m in funding

DELOS, an Indonesian aquaculture-tech company, has raised $8 million in Seed extension financing co-led by Centauri, a collaborative fund between MDI Ventures and KB Investment Co., Ltd. and Southeast Asian venture capital fund Alpha JWC Ventures.

MDI-KB’s Centauri and Alpha JWC Ventures are joined by existing investors, Number Capital, Arise, iSeed SEA, Irvan Kolonas, as well as Alto Partners Multi-Family Office, Mahanusa Capital, Kopi Kenangan founder James Prananto, and a number of strategic follow-on investors.

The company, founded in 2021 by Guntur Mallarangeng, Bobby Indra Gunawan, Alexander Farthing, and Aristya Noerhadi, seeks to drive the growth and modernization of the Indonesian aquaculture industry and its integration into the global seafood industry, a vision the company calls the “Blue Revolution”.

DELOS’ founder mix brings a multidisciplinary team that includes aquaculture, marine and microbiology, technology, and business backgrounds working in concert to accelerate the growth of the Indonesian aquaculture industry.

The company plans to use the funds to accelerate the onboarding of its vast backlog of client farms, and continue to build and scale its main products AquaHero, AquaLink, and AquaBank to accelerate the growth of Indonesian aquaculture.

This year, the company will continue to reinforce and expand AquaHero’s product scope, accuracy, features, and clients, with the spirit of improving farm productivity and profitability, thus adding value to the industry. It is targeting at least 200 hectares under management in a year’s time.

In its few months of operations following its initial seed round, DELOS has been working on developing its leading product line, AquaHero, a full-stack farm productivity system that combines scientific expertise, technology, and operational excellence to boost farm yields.

The AquaHero product utilizes top-class data collection methods and a cutting edge biological model to predict and mitigate harvest risk, a model that will be trained on thousands of shrimp ponds within the DELOS ecosystem across Indonesia. That, combined with the necessary technology stack and operational expertise, will serve to increase farm productivity for the Indonesian aquaculture industry.

“DELOS’ reception in the aquaculture industry has been positive, with client acquisition outpacing the team’s capability to onboard farms. Since November 2021, the company is on track to on-boarding 100 hectares of intensive and super-intensive shrimp farms, with an existing demand backlog of more than 600 hectares in our pipeline,” says Guntur.

“We want to push Indonesia to realize and harness the true potential of its vast seas, making them into
major, and sustainable, national economic drivers in the near future.”

DELOS is establishing the DELOS Maritime Institute (DMI) in Yogyakarta in order to educate and train workforce-ready aquaculture talent as well as support scientific and technological R&D efforts.