A former fish farmer’s startup is flourishing during a tech downturn

Gibran Huzaifah is the co-founder of eFishery, Indonesia’s first aquaculture startup and its newest unicorn. The company provides digital tools for fish farm management to 70,000 farmers across 280 cities in Indonesia, and has bigger plans for building an aquaculture ecosystem. In early July, they announced $200 million in series D funding led by 42XFund, the Abu Dhabi-based global fund manager.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

At first, I never wanted to build a technology startup. I was a fish farmer. So I did not study the market opportunity, benchmarking the industry, etc. It was just not my direction. I had a fish pond and I wanted to make it bigger.

I talked with so many fish farmers and saw there was a problem in the fish feeding system, and it led me to think about how to automate fish feeding. So, my partner and I made a feeding machine that we called eFeeder to make feeding systems more efficient. The business idea was as simple as that. Turned out it could be transformed into an internet business that solves a crucial problem in the aquaculture sector.

In 2013, smartphones were still a luxury item. Most of the farmers did not have one. Meanwhile, we came up with a mobile solution. The farmers couldn’t understand us when we talked to them about mobile-based [Internet of Things] solutions. When we talk about automation, they thought it would replace humans. They thought that it did not make sense to use technology. So we had to educate them about technology, make them understand its value before they wanted to use the product.

We have targeted 1 million fish farmers over the next five years. We are currently focused on connecting upstream to downstream. We want to offer a shorter time span and cycle from farming to processing the product — compared to the industry now, where there’s so many middlemen.