Aquaculture Tales
Meet SATS Member: Technology Company Aquabyte
Bryton Shang, Founder and CEO, Aquabyte
Stronger America Through Seafood (SATS) continues to expand its membership. The advocacy group added Aquabyte, a Silicon Valley based technology company using machine learning and computer vision to improve fish farming sustainability, as its newest member.
SATS spoke with Bryton Shang, Founder and CEO of Aquabyte, to learn more about his background, what led him to founding his company, and the role of technology in the expansion of American aquaculture. The exchange can be read below.
How did you first learn about aquaculture?
I was introduced to aquaculture in 2017, partly through my previous cofounder who had been interested in the space and a family friend who was an aquaculture professor at Cornell. Leading up to that time, I had been working on a number of applications for machine learning and computer vision technology to support an algorithmic stock trading firm and another company that was using computer vision to detect cancer tissue images.
What led you to launch Aquabyte?
My decision to launch Aquabyte was rooted in the belief that if you’re going to spend your time and energy working on something, you want it to be good for the world, the environment, and sustainability. Three billion people each day depend on fish as their primary food source and is really important from a global perspective. A lot of innovators who work with us feel the same way and are driven by a similar mission.
After learning about aquaculture, I had an opportunity to incubate a new company at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley by bringing the same machine learning and computer vision technologies to aquaculture that we use in self-driving cars and many other applications. It was something I was really fascinated with, due in part to the size and impact of the industry—it’s over half the seafood we eat today. If you think about the world being 70 percent water and that we only use 5 percent of the food from our oceans, aquaculture is really fascinating and important in terms of its potential global impact.
How does machine learning help make aquaculture more sustainable?
If you’re a farmer thinking about how to run your farm more efficiently, you’re thinking about things like how to keep your fish healthy, how much your fish weigh and how much you should feed them. You also want to know how many fish you have available because you ultimately want to harvest the fish and sell them.
The idea is that we can build software that helps farmers, for example, count sea lice so they can better assess fish health or determine the weight of their fish—something that’s critical to understanding whether they’re growing efficiently and eating the right amount of food. We also help detect other indicators of fish health such as wounds and deformities.
Our software uses an underwater camera that goes into the fish pen and takes pictures of the fish. We then run that through machine learning algorithms, like those used to run Tesla’s autopilot system, to recognize health indicators and ID markers on the fish. That information is then uploaded to a website where the fish farmers can see charts and dashboards about what’s happening in their fish pens and make better decisions based on data.
What role do you see technology playing in the evolution of aquaculture in the United States?
Growing the U.S. aquaculture industry is really a question of how much fish can you grow while maintaining a sustainable environment. It’s understanding things such as the effect of parasites and pollution. So how does technology help? Technology like ours is used in salmon and trout farms in Norway and Chile to demonstrate that fish farms are sustainable and aren’t polluting the environment. We’re able to monitor the number of pollutants and parasites that are coming from these farms, and in turn that allows the industry to grow transparently and sustainably.
Just imagine being a fish farmer maintaining one of these fish pens, which is roughly the length of half of a football field in diameter and 100 feet deep— it’s so large you could submerge an entire 737 plane in the pen. Standing on the side of the pen, there’s no way for fish farmers to tell if their fish are growing or how healthy they are. But with technology, farmers can now measure weight and pollution for the first time, which addresses the main concerns people have about fish farms, and thereby helps facilitate growth.
How can the expansion of aquaculture here in the U.S., through policies and regulations, help entrepreneurs like yourself and others in this industry, grow their business here in America?
We started our business in California, and the first place I thought to look was California fish farms or other farms in the U.S. What we realized was that there are a lot of folks who are passionate about aquaculture in the U.S., but there’s quite a few hoops to jump through to get the permitting you need to grow a sustainable industry, and the jurisdiction is unclear regarding which agencies are responsible for what.
For us starting a new business, we certainly needed to go where we could find customers who could support us, so one of the first places we looked beyond the U.S. was Norway, which produces about half of the world’s salmon. Our hope in working with Stronger America Through Seafood is that we can help grow our domestic aquaculture industry, and bring best-in-practice learnings from places like Norway to the U.S.
The U.S. has an opportunity to be a leader in the global aquaculture industry– not only helping to grow our economy and create more jobs, but also by creating a more sustainable future for our country. Aquaculture is a meaningful solution to global food deficits and the U.S. can and should be leading the way. But before that can happen, we need federal action to support the expansion of an aquaculture industry here in the U.S. We need to put in place the proper federal policies and regulations that will allow the aquaculture industry to expand here in the U.S.
If America significantly expands its aquaculture production, should we expect to see more aquaculture tech companies launching in the U.S. and creating new jobs for American workers?
Yes, I definitely think so. Building more offshore and nearshore fish farms in the U.S. could certainly provide new job opportunities for U.S. workers. Our vision is to eventually have a fish farm in every town that provides fresh, local, sustainable fish.
If you could say one thing to the lawmakers deciding whether to expand aquaculture production in the U.S., what would it be?
I would tell them that the U.S. has a chance to really be at the forefront of aquaculture development in the world. Ten years ago, we didn’t have the ability to monitor our pens like we do now. Today, we have the opportunity and ability to be the leader in how aquaculture can grow sustainably by leveraging the insights, technologies, and policies that have been developed elsewhere. Through utilizing the latest technology and policies, the American aquaculture industry can continue to grow in a way that is environmentally sustainable, protecting our oceans and natural resources, while creating more jobs and economic opportunity here in the U.S. At a global scale, we have the opportunity to provide a sustainable, alternative source of protein for a growing population and demand.