Shinkei Systems raises $22M Series A to resore American seafood with fish-killing robots

was named after the safe. Yes. Good nominative determinism. Crazy. Crazy. Fantastic. What if he just only raises on safes? Yeah. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Hey gentlemen. How's it going my man? Fantastic. What's going on? Good. Hang up. Cool.

So yeah, Delian already said your whole life story, everything the business does. He leaked the news. Now he leak a few of the few few bits here and there of the tech road maps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um well, it's so exciting to finally have you on. You've just been uh honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar.

Uh and just real G's move in silence like lasagna. That's right. Um, but uh I've been able to witness uh your journey dating back to uh probably it must be like two and a half years ago at this point.

But watching you go from solo founder uh you know you had come out of YC working on something that was that had uh I I was immediately a believer in you and and um uh you know invested but um you know going watching the transition from solo founder you had absolutely you know not saying this in a bad way absolutely zero hype around the business at all.

you were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, that the idea sounds cool, but but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on.

Um, and now uh you know, couple years later, you're announcing uh the kind of round that uh every every founder dreams of. So, why don't you break it down? Um, and then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company. Yeah, first I have to say it feels like two and a half, three years ago.

It was only a year and a half. Wow. Wow. So, well, that's five years in in venture. So, back. Yeah. We're really excited to announce our series A. We've raised 22 million uh co-led by Delhi and Fund and uh Logos Capital and we um are reshoring American seafood. Amazing. Um, breakdown. Uh, here we go. Wait for that.

They They went to the wrong They went to the wrong screen. Hit it again, John, for we're having uh Sorry, Safe. We're having Yeah, we're we're having massive technical difficulties today due to the internet's under attack. AWS, but your robots are probably running, you know, locally hopefully.

Um but uh but anyways, yeah, break down kind of the the your background, history of the company, how you got to this point, uh and all that and all that good stuff. For sure. Well, Jordy, as you know, I like to say I come from a seaf fairing family.

Uh you know, I was born in Canada, but you know, raised in the Middle East. Um so was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea. Have matching sedator tattoos and my granddad, all like kind of peripheral. Uh no one's formerly in seafood, but like you know, it's uh I have like very big library of just fish photos of my dad.

Yeah, it's a classic. And then uh yeah, you know, I moved to the US um you know, when I was 18. Uh and then basically, you know, a few years into college. Yeah. Solo. Yeah. Solo immigrant. Um and then um yeah, basically have uh you know, the the core of Shink really comes from from that portion.

You know, I kind of like left seafood alone for a while. And then uh one of my early mornings in grad school, there was this essay in the newspaper about this vegan activist, which is kind of ironic.

um uh called if fish could scream and it was all about how because fish don't have vocal cords we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals like cows and chickens and terrestrials you know um and that kind of got me thinking I first wanted to work on some more like skits art projects to do with that but I funnel that energy towards um you know what we're now working on today right so the essay was really talking about you know what Delian said that you know when you walk into most mass market retailers most of the fish you're buying are basically brought onto the deck of a boat and left to suffocate And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness, right?

And so in that time they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decay in meat quality and the shelf life of fish.

And so, you know, uh I was kind of like perusing around on the Reddit Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes and I found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now. Um which is basically like a Japanese analog to uh kosher slaughter for cows if you're familiar.

Basically, like D said, you basically spike the fish in the brain. You cut the gills off, cut the tail. Achieve all the same things that basically rather than the fish flopping around. You stop the experience of stress, you remove the blood, and so the meat can last up to three times as long.

You taste mission star quality, you know, the fish that you have to if you want to get fish like this, it's flown over from Japan. Um, and so yeah, we're basically scaling those up, you know, and our first product is called Poseidon. It basically uh produces Michelin great fish at commodity costs. Incredible.

uh break down kind of the early history because I know you went through YC and this was at a time when when uh there there there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies. I think they had a request for startups for fish, right?

They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but but uh but you made it in.

Um and and and I just remember that it was you you you had this very kind of um you know fast takeoff where where one day uh one day it was just like you and and a few Y you know YC safe and and maybe a handful of other investors and then you really started building out the team.

So maybe maybe talk about that that early day kind of those early days little a little bit of corporate history. I took the company full-time in, you know, uh, early 2022. Um, you know, we went through YC, presented at the summer down the day, and then, uh, you know, from there, uh, basically kept our heads down.

Um, I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business. Um, you know, both in the business model and the, uh, you know, the R&D and, uh, I had two junior engineers with me and we basically didn't do anything else for like two years.

I was like, you know, I started with like being in the cold domain. So going from like the like desert Dubai to the winter of Maine was like an insane insane life experience. Um you know probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone's seen.

Um and then uh you know have basically you know we we we had this inflection point really around the time that you and I met you know which is you know a few people taking early bets on us.

Um and that kind of catalyzed uh you know hiring you know the core of our founding team you know which is like you know early Andreal computer vision engineers you know my co-founders at SpaceX leading the avionics team on Starship um commercial fisherman robotics PhDs and you know a lot of that the core DNA there is like really you know become you know what uh we're very prideful to say is like you know a top engineering culture you know and driven of that now as we start to scale out the sales you know, a top company culture as a whole.

Um, you know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half would like I think would take, you know, companies years and years to do.

We're already producing robots like as fast as like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're uh we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to, but like, you know, we have a robot that can uh the payback time is in weeks, you know, it's not months.

What's it like uh what's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to uh when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day?

You know, it's funny, you know, um we we had uh you know, one of our founding engineers, Jen, um you know, told me this great story once and she doesn't know that use all the time.

Uh that, you know, we went to hackathon uh you know, she was like probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at Andreal really early on.

Um and so you know she went to hackathons and Androids really early and no one want you know the time no one wanted to um really spend you know any time really at all uh listening to you know defense hardware and now as you guys know it is like you know the biggest thing you know when we talk about hardware and you know so when we went to hackathon about you know probably a year ago now um the sentiment was really similar you know like people were like oh fish what you know oh meat you know um and we we got thrown off by you know intern like freshman and sophomores from like waterl by water interns yeah literally um it's so it's it's funny to say because now like you know we have like this you know we can be like really selective where like we're now kind of the opposite scenario of like turning down all these top engineers uh really because we just you know we want to keep the bar really high and um you know our philosophy is like hiring smart nice people.

And that sounds really trivial, but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high. And you you generally have one or the other. You have people who are like really really smart, but they know they're so smart that they're uh they have really high egos.

Um and then vice versa, you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like make up for the fact they're not that smart. And uh golden retriever mode. This sounds like Pavle's uh hiring hiring criteria. They have to have that dog in them and they have to be nice with it. Facts. Facts. Smart and nice.

Yeah, it's a little more sus. Well, you can be nice with it and not be nice, right? Like basically have motion. That's called having motion. You got to have the rhythm and the tism, right? I saw I saw that on the Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics.

We've we've heard from a lot of folks that uh the supply chain is incredibly complicated. Um I I mean you're not at like such an incredible scale that there's probably like geopolitical implications necessarily just yet, but uh what has that been like? What who are your key suppliers?

Are you able to retrofit uh certain parts of machines? Like how much are you building? How much are you buying? What are the key suppliers in your in your world? So we do some very light manufacturing in house. A lot of it is uh you know using like local partners all of which are you know Elsagundo. Exactly.

All put it together. We do all the assembly in house. You know, in terms of like tariff impact and, you know, geopolitical, you know, impacts from, you know, the current administration. Um, honestly, it's been fairly net um helpful.

The, you know, yes, the price of steel and all that has just like gone up, but you know, for us, like, I'm not sure if you know, but um, you know, there's been a lot of like, um, deregulation and, you know, and like tariffs around seafood.

And so because of that, we're able to just like clean up the rest of like all the imported uh fish that are coming in from almost all countries. Interesting. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now? Uh I don't.

Um it's like country by country, but I imagine it's like over 10% everywhere, right? Close to 20 at this point. It's obviously varies depending on skew and species and size, but we that amount is basically the entire margin for the importer.

So for them they're just kind of like and then there's also massive shipping costs I'm sure. Exactly. Because it's cold chain and that's way more way more expensive than just like throw it on a, you know, a big shipping container. Talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term.

When when we met, you had uh incredible ambitions right away. You wanted to build, you know, fleets and basically own the entire stack from, you know, catching the fish all the way through delivery to to the customer.

Um, it feels like, you know, your ambitions are still massive, but but you've really narrowed in on on focusing on some key areas. What does the business look like today? What does it look like, you know, a decade from now? Great question.

Um, I'm not going to go into too much detail on the former just because we're we kind of stay a little more quiet about that, but you know, we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically like h halfway like between a robotics company and a CV wholesaler and processor.

So the model that we have is you know Shink is a parent company basically you know uh manufactures all these machines um you know and for every Poseidon that we build um we give them to a fisherman for free and so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman having after starting the company and so the way that they actually make money is actually not for deployed fisherman yeah for deployed at the um and so the way that we make money is not actually as like like labor cost by the hour generally like it can depend But most of the time it's as a proportion of the catch.

So it's a gross profit dependent. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands. And so for us, you know, that's why we didn't want to add, you know, add load to the stuff. We basically give them machines for free.

And then we actually pay them a premium uh over the commodity like dot price uh so that they're actually incentivized. So there's no risk to them. It's they sit on our balance sheet. We basically own and maintain them. They just operate them.

And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors. Um, and we didn't even get into this, but I want to take a quick second. This is basically a machine. You put a fish in one side of it. It it it pulls the fish through.

It uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain. Yep. Takes it out and then it and then it moves on. That's correct, right? Yeah. We also cut the the gills as well. Wow. Yeah. Which is just crazy. and doing that on a ship that is at moving at sea. It's not like there's one size of fish.

This isn't assembling iPhones. Yeah, we can do multiple multiple sizes. 5 seconds of fish. It's pretty fast. Yeah, that's amazing. Um Yeah. And I mean, you know, rejecting like multi-year shelf lives on the robots that, you know, again, we can like pay back in 12 weeks. So, pretty fun.

Multi-ear shelf life is also big because I imagine like salt water gets in these things. There's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements. It's not some super clean room, right?

And and so that's where, you know, background on a lot of our team, you know, like when Reed is working on avionics, you know, like, you know, obviously like space and the marine are very different, but like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments.

Like a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood. Very cool. Talk about uh where you guys are being distributed already, where the where the product is actually ending up. I I don't know what what logos you can share, but Yeah. Yeah. We're uh you name it, we're probably there in terms of metros.

So like New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver, you know, a lot of those places. We're basically in like the like highest and top top uh shelf fish for the segments. We uh we sell wholesale to distributors like I mentioned for restaurants, but we also sell directly to retailers.

We have one retailer um uh in New York that we sell to um the only retailer that we have. Um, but across all the restaurants, we have like over 40 Michelin stars. Um, and we're probably moving about 40 Michelin stars. I'm hitting the size. Congratulations. That's a lot of hit. Oh yeah, there we go.

This is the third gong. Love to hear it. Resating through my bloodline. I remember that one. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. You have anything else, Jordy? We We do have uh Henry. Yeah, I mean this is awesome. Come back on regularly.

Um, let's uh let's let's do a let's do Yeah, let's let's do a taste test on the stream soon. Sure. Great job, guys. Uh, you guys are just getting started and it's been incredible to fall. I just I love watching you win. Uh, I knew you would.

Uh, and I can't wait for uh, you know, it's I guess it's been a year and a half. I can't wait for the next uh, decade. So, congrats to team. Congratulations. Cheers, Emman.