Oct 30, 2021

DELOS, an aquaculture technology startup located in Indonesia, said today that it has secured an undisclosed seed round led by Arise, a joint venture between MDI Ventures and Finch Capital. MDI Ventures, Number Capital, iSeed Asia, Irvan Kolonas of JAPFA, one of the country’s leading shrimp feed and seed suppliers, and Hendra Kwik of fintech startup PayFazz all participated in the fundraising round. DELOS intended to utilise the extra cash to expand and enhance their shrimp production software, which anticipates and suggests measures to increase farm profitability and productivity. It will also be used to integrate value chains and onboard additional DELOS farm partners. Guntur Mallarangeng, Bobby Indra Gunawan, and Alexander Farthing formed the firm in 2021. It was formed in the context of Indonesia’s shrimp industry’s potential expansion, which was inhibited by issues such as low technology adoption, weak management practices, and limited access to funding. “These factors have created a bottleneck within the midstream of the value chain, and are throttling the output of downstream processors to an average of 40 to 60 percent capacity,” the company wrote in a statement. “This productivity gap is what is keeping a US $2 billion industry from fulfilling its latent potential and becoming a US $4 billion industry. The value chain is ready for farm productivity to increase.” DELOS’ full-stack farm management system is designed to help existing Indonesian shrimp farms increase their productive capacity and output by 50 to 150 percent, generating value for farmers, increasing national export volumes, and enhancing Indonesia’s reputation as a world-leading aquaculture nation. To speed the development of in-house solutions, the startup has partnered with Dewi Laut Aquaculture, a local aquaculture company, and Alune Aqua, a renowned aquaculture fintech firm. “Classic challenges in the multi-layer value chain, low productivity, and lack of financing hinder the archipelago’s untapped shrimp industry that makes up 77 percent out of the overall fishery output values. DELOS tech-enabled solution has managed to immerse the tech and the ops into local farmers’ culture and infrastructure while bridging them with the incumbent stakeholders. It leads to higher FCR (Feed Conversion Ratio), SR (Survival Rate), and Harvest, making it such a killer flywheel,” commented Aldi Adrian Hartanto, Partner of Arise. Apart from eFishery, Jala, and Aruna, DELOS is the most recent Indonesian aquaculture firm to get outside finance.