Smart aquaculture technology company Agavita said on the 4th that it has secured seed investment from The Ventures.
Agavita is a startup developing a full-cycle smart aquaculture operating system that integrates fish measurement, monitoring, forecasting, and control based on non-contact vision AI technology. Chief Executive Kim Ki-seok, formerly of 42dot, an Autonomous Driving subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, founded the company.
Korea's aquaculture industry is facing a mounting crisis across the board, with some farms seeing mass die-offs amid a decline in fishing village populations, rising water temperatures from the climate crisis, and the emergence of new diseases. To address these issues, Agavita aims to build an AI-based "full-cycle operating system" that enables stable farming of high value-added species with minimal labor. In particular, the company plans to prove its technological capabilities by selecting aquaculture technology for high value-added species with a high degree of industrialization difficulty, such as Pacific bluefin tuna, as its first project.
The investment will be used to build facilities at demonstration fish farms, advance vision AI-based measurement and behavior prediction models, research standardization of smart aquaculture data, and prepare commercialization targeting global aquaculture leaders such as Japan and Australia. Agavita plans to quickly secure global demonstration cases centered on high value-added species and, in connection with national-level consortia, drive the spread of standardization and field-application technologies in the aquaculture industry.
Kim Ki-seok, CEO of Agavita, said, "Agavita's core competitiveness is non-contact management technology that obtains individual information without taking fish out of the water," adding, "Based on the full-cycle aquaculture operating system that began in Korea, we will spread Agavita's smart aquaculture technology as a global standard."
In November, Agavita formed a consortium with KAIST to build an AI-based fisheries ecosystem management system and is strengthening research and development through industry-academia-research collaboration.