JALA Tech is a technology and data analytics company for shrimp farmers founded in 2017 by long-time shrimp farmer Aryo Wiryawan. The startup recently secured an investment from 500 Startup, bringing total investments to a total of $600,000 (€548,032) including previous funding from aquaculture accelerator HATCH Blue.

But with current pilots running in Beijing, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, the company may be setting its eyes on the rest of southeast Asia in the coming years, CEO Liris Maduningtyas told IntraFish.

Since inception, the company has captured three out of the five major shrimp feed producers in Indonesia, including CP Foods, Skretting Indonesia, making it the leading data analytics tool for shrimp farmers in the country.

"Of course I welcome competitors, because the more competitors you have the better it is for the industry," Maduningtyas said. "But we have strong connections to the market, we have the best people on the ground. We were born from the farmer's perspective. Not the corporate perspective."

The company sells hardware in the form of the "hover," which has the sensors to collect data. There are currently 2,200 farmers using JALA, and more than 5,000 shrimp ponds being monitored by the software. Accuracy for predictions are above 90 percent.

Data as a defense against shrimp disease?

"In the beginning, the idea was to make real-time monitoring for the ponds and a way to make decisions quickly when things went wrong, but as the company grew we found that the real problem we needed to solve was shrimp disease," Maduningtyas said.

The key diseases are white spot disease and white feces disease, which the company is focusing its machine learning on. Maduningtyas said the company will stay focused on shrimp as a species for the next two to three years at least, before moving to other species.

"It's not easy. We're on our way to get there, and we're on the fast lane, so of course, we'd like to be the first one to reach the end."

Aquaculture

Shrimp data analytics startup already has CP Foods, Skretting on board