Launch HN: OctaPulse (YC W26) – Robotics and computer vision for fish farming

3/3/2026 at 2:05:22 PM

Impressive engineering, genuinely. But I'd push back on the framing that scaling aquaculture is straightforwardly good.

Fish sentience is increasingly well-supported in the neuroscience literature. We already kill somewhere around 1-2 TRILLION fish annually... a number that dwarfs land animal slaughter yet attracts almost no ethical scrutiny. Optimising and scaling that system is worth examining carefully.

The part of your website that says "land can't feed 10B people, wild fisheries are maxed out, therefore aquaculture" also quietly ignores plant-based protein, which is more land-efficient and doesn't require instrumentalising sentient animals at industrial scale.

I'm not saying the engineering problems aren't interesting. They clearly are. But at 1-2 trillion deaths per year, this is the largest scale of animal killing in human history, and we're building better tools to do more of it.

by billynomates

3/3/2026 at 3:53:21 PM

This is a thoughtful critique and I appreciate you raising it directly. You are right that fish sentience is getting more attention in the literature and it deserves more ethical scrutiny than it currently receives. We do not take the position that scaling aquaculture is straightforwardly good without tradeoffs. There are real welfare concerns and the industry has not always handled them well.

A few thoughts on where we stand:

On welfare specifically, our technology actually reduces stress on fish compared to the current manual process. Traditional phenotyping involves netting, anesthesia, and physical handling. Our system measures fish without any of that. Less handling means lower cortisol, lower mortality, and healthier animals. We are not neutral on welfare. We think better measurement tools should lead to better treatment, not just faster growth.

On plant based protein, you are right that our framing glosses over it. Plant based is more efficient on land use and we are not arguing against it. The reality is that billions of people rely on fish as their primary protein source today and that is not going to change overnight. We are trying to make the aquaculture that already exists more sustainable and humane, not argue that it is the only path forward.

On the scale of killing, I do not have a good answer for that. It is a massive number and I understand why that gives you pause. What I can say is that if aquaculture is going to exist at scale, we would rather it be done with better data, less stress on the animals, and more intentional breeding practices than the status quo.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 7:08:38 PM

As a home aquaponics grower, I am really interested in the opportunity to develop tools that help this industry grow smarter. The impact to open-water fisheries can be undone if the markets can be affected to appreciate farm-raised fish for their quality.

I think there is such an incredible opportunity in the sector, and it probably looks a lot like any of the other sectors that have been augmented by data - gather giant piles of any measurable detail, and hope that after filtering you see a pattern that doesn't depend on your production environment running as many sensors ( or tensors ).

Last Thought: Fish transfer pumps are not only a thing, but one of the best ways to have the whole pond population march past your camera in a lighting environment where you have more control.

https://www.miprcorp.com/fish-pumping/ - just one example with decent pictures

by cameron_b

3/2/2026 at 7:23:40 PM

This is a great comment. You are absolutely right about the data opportunity. The industry is so data sparse right now that even basic measurements at scale would be a step change. We are seeing that firsthand with our customer. They went from sampling a few dozen fish by hand to continuous measurement and the insights are already compounding.

Thank you for the fish pump link. We have looked at pump based systems as a way to create controlled measurement environments. You get consistent lighting, predictable fish orientation, and the fish are already moving through a constrained path. The challenge is you are still dealing with water turbidity, particulates, and bubbles in the flow which can mess with imaging. It is better than open water but not a free pass on the vision problems.

We have also been looking at pescalators which use an Archimedes screw design to lift fish out of the water. Some setups combine this with anesthetization for operations that require handling. The tradeoff is you are adding stress and complexity but you get a much cleaner imaging environment. There is no single right answer here and the best approach depends on the species, life stage, and what you are trying to measure. This is definitely technology that will develop over time as the industry matures.

What species are you working with in your aquaponics setup?

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 9:26:50 PM

Tilapia, because the grow-out plan is very well documented. I'd happily sacrifice growth rate for a fish with higher "desirability" factor, and perhaps a lower optimal temperature. I previously tried Bluegill and lost them, I think, due to stress from temperature variation. I'd like to try them again or go with Catfish. Catfish are the top species (for food, by weight) produced in the US, and they seem nearly as durable as Tilapia in small systems.

The pescalators sound great. There are so many tools like that where the application specifics ( species, system, life stage ) could make room for a scalpel-precise optimization of some tool, but the benefits would have to come from scale, and there just haven't been many first-movers ( or they keep quiet and defend the moat ) who seem poised to raise the tide for the whole industry. It is very ripe for the work you are doing to help the downstream gains over generations of stocks.

Cheers to you guys!

by cameron_b

3/2/2026 at 9:37:44 PM

Tilapia is a great species and the resilience is impressive. We have not started working with tilapia yet but love that it is one of the best species being grown in developing countries due to ability to thrive in warm and turbid water.

by Pgrech

3/4/2026 at 10:07:31 AM

> The impact to open-water fisheries can be undone if the markets appreciate farm-raised fish for their quality.

Is not so simple. Marine Aquaculture needs huge amounts of wild fishes to feed the farm fishes. The more aquaculture you have, more pressure on some fisheries. Also less pressure on other, that in fact adds an extra of pressure to the first fisheries. China has increased its fleet in the last decades for that.

All this "fishes are sentient" stuff is toxic for your job. My advice is to avoid it like a plague. This people would be typically unable to keep a carnivore fish alive.

by pvaldes

3/4/2026 at 3:25:41 PM

You raise a valid point about feed. It is true that carnivorous species like salmon still have FIFO ratios above 1.0, meaning they consume more wild fish than they produce. That is a real concern for those species.

That said, the feed picture has changed a lot over the past two decades. The overall FIFO ratio for aquaculture dropped from 0.63 in 2000 to around 0.22 to 0.28 by 2017 depending on how you calculate it. Modern feeds are increasingly plant based with soy, barley, and other terrestrial proteins making up the bulk of formulations. Up to 30% of fishmeal now comes from processing byproducts rather than whole wild fish. There is also a lot of work happening on alternative proteins like insect meal, algae, and single cell proteins.

The species matters a lot here. Tilapia, catfish, and carps use very little wild fish in their feed. Salmon and shrimp are the outliers that drive most of the wild fish dependency. We are currently working with trout which sits somewhere in the middle.

On the sentience discussion, I am not going to dismiss people who care about fish welfare. It is a legitimate concern and the science on fish cognition is evolving. Our technology actually reduces stress on fish compared to manual handling which involves netting, anesthesia, and physical manipulation. If people care about welfare then better measurement tools that minimize handling should be part of the solution.

by rohxnsxngh

3/4/2026 at 5:27:34 PM

> The species matters a lot. Tilapia, catfish, and carps use very little wild fish in their feed

The big problem with herbivores is that nobody really likes their muddy taste. This market only works if you can raise this fishes for free with organic discards. Sea Aquaculture is a totally different planet.

I'm aware of the inclusion of vegetable proteins on the diet since decades, but is a tricky issue. Too much of them and the fishes don't grow well, and too low and the costs of feeding your fishes raise over the value of your fishes in the market. And you still need to import your food. This is a big point. Unexpected 10% more of tariffs just because the president farted that night, means the death of your company.

by pvaldes

3/4/2026 at 3:37:18 PM

A lot of research and development has been conducted in diet plans to have an optimal balance for growth while incorporating alternative protein sources, reducing reliance on wild caught fish for feed.

by Pgrech

3/3/2026 at 12:19:33 AM

I like your project. I'm a SWE working on something completely different by day but tinkering with several other side projects, including this, https://github.com/ratsbane/panda-mcp/ (which is accelerating my computer vision learning rapidly) I'm interested in your choice of the OAK cameras because I'm trying to select a camera model also. I started this with a simple USB webcam and added a PhotoNeo camera. I've just switched to RealSense and I've got a couple of ZED cameras on order but now I'm looking at the OAK-D and thinking that it makes a lot of sense to run a nn directly on the camera.

by ratsbane

3/3/2026 at 5:58:10 AM

well these days inference can be done on CPUs depending on the size of a model. the OAK-D camera's especially are literally just computer. They are linux and you can SSH directly into them which is insane. The camera itself is shaped like a heat sink to dissipate heat. it's honestly phenomenal. I talked to the CEO of the company as well and I'm really impressed with their machine and supply chain. so all in all, high hopes for them.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 2:29:41 PM

Interesting to see CV applied to aquaculture — this is one of those domains where the ROI on automation is enormous but underexplored because the talent pipeline skews toward adtech and fintech.

One thing I'd push on: how are you handling distribution shift from turbidity and lighting variation across facilities? In my experience deploying vision models in non-controlled environments (industrial, not fish specifically), the gap between lab accuracy and production accuracy is almost entirely driven by domain shift in image quality. Continuous calibration pipelines — where you flag low-confidence predictions for human review and retrain on the corrected labels — tend to matter more than the initial model architecture choice.

Also curious about the welfare angle that came up in the thread. Selective breeding guided by phenotype scoring has obvious parallels to the poultry industry's problematic optimization for growth rate. Are you building in any multi-objective constraints (e.g., health markers alongside growth metrics) to avoid that failure mode?

by gracelynewhouse

3/3/2026 at 3:59:04 PM

We are doing exactly what you described with continuous calibration. We have essentially built our own in-house labeling, ingesting, and task assignment software for these tasks. Low confidence predictions get flagged for review, corrected labels feed back into training, and we retrain on a rolling basis. We also stratify our calibration datasets intentionally by time of day, tank conditions, and fish density rather than just grabbing random frames. Early on our datasets were too homogenous and the models would work great in testing then degrade in production. The architecture matters less than having a tight feedback loop between deployment and retraining.

On the welfare angle, yes we are thinking about this carefully. The data we collect includes body shape, fin integrity, spinal curvature, and other morphological traits that are signals of fish health and robustness, not just growth rate. Farms that care about sustainability can use this to select for fish that are healthy and resilient rather than just fast growing. The tool is neutral but the selection criteria are up to the breeder. We do not want to enable the same failure mode that happened with poultry.

The talent pipeline point is interesting too. You are right that most CV talent ends up in adtech or fintech. We have found that people get excited about working on something physical and tangible once they realize the problems are just as hard.

by rohxnsxngh

3/4/2026 at 2:58:56 PM

That feedback loop architecture sounds right — the homogenous dataset trap is one of the most common failure modes in production CV and it's good you caught it early. The welfare data angle is particularly interesting. The distinction between "the tool is neutral but the selection criteria are up to the breeder" makes sense bc it avoids the poultry industry's mistake of optimizing the selector itself. Have you published anything on the calibration pipeline? Would love to see the methodology.

by gracelynewhouse

3/4/2026 at 3:27:38 PM

We have not published anything yet but it is on our roadmap. Right now we are heads down on deployment and iterating fast so documentation has taken a backseat. Once we have more data across multiple facilities and species we want to write up what we have learned about calibration strategies for non-controlled environments. There is not a lot of practical literature out there on edge CV in wet and variable conditions so it feels like something worth sharing.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 9:30:40 PM

> Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.

I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.

[0] https://www.ciwf.org/programmes/better-chicken/

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/468348/atlantic-salmon-fa...

by setgree

3/2/2026 at 11:39:23 PM

This is a really important point and something we think about a lot. You are absolutely right that chicken optimization has come with serious welfare tradeoffs. Breeding purely for growth rate without considering the animal's ability to actually live comfortably is how you end up with birds that cannot walk properly. We do not want to enable that trajectory for fish.

The good news is that the data we are collecting can be used to select for more than just growth. Body shape, fin integrity, spinal curvature, and other morphological traits are all signals of fish health and welfare. Farms that care about sustainability can use this data to breed fish that are robust and healthy, not just fast growing. The tool is neutral but the selection criteria are up to the breeder.

On the environmental side, our focus right now is on land based hatcheries and recirculating aquaculture systems rather than open net pens in the ocean. These closed systems avoid a lot of the dewilding and pollution concerns you mentioned. They are more expensive to operate but they keep farmed fish separate from wild populations and give you much more control over waste and water quality. And yes, reducing handling stress is a big part of what we are building. The manual process today involves netting, anesthesia, and physical manipulation. Our system can measure fish without any of that. Less stress on the animal and better data for the farmer.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 5:43:23 PM

This is an awesome concept. Thanks for sharing.

Have you had any issues with turbidity so far?

by donalbrecht

3/2/2026 at 5:47:00 PM

Thanks! Yes turbidity has been one of our bigger challenges. Water clarity can shift dramatically throughout the day depending on feeding, fish activity, and weather. We have had to build our calibration datasets to capture that variance otherwise the quantized models degrade fast in production. We are also experimenting with different lighting setups to cut through particulate but it is still a work in progress :)

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 6:29:08 AM

This is Awesome.

On a different note, if you bring this up or think about India too, how will it impact manual farmers whose entire livelihood is tied to doing the job? Or am I reading it (automation) wrong?

Btw, I’ve never liked a website taking over my mouse pointer or the scroll UI and behavior. But yours is so well done, it is lovely, cute, and is indeed very fishy.

by Brajeshwar

3/3/2026 at 3:57:23 PM

Great question. We are specifically targeting vertically integrated farms which are usually massive scale operations with hundreds of thousands to millions of fish. These facilities already have significant labor costs for trained technicians and geneticists doing manual phenotyping and sorting. We are not going after small scale manual farmers or trying to be an eFishery type business that serves smallholders.

The labor dynamics are also different at these large farms. The work we are automating is repetitive, physically demanding, and hard to staff consistently. Most of the farm managers we talk to are not trying to replace people, they are struggling to find enough workers willing to do this work in the first place. Automation at this scale tends to shift jobs rather than eliminate them entirely. And thank you for the kind words on the website! We have gotten mixed reviews on the cursor so enjoy it while it lasts lol

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 7:16:57 PM

Great product!

I wonder how do you manage data labeling? Do you outsource it by using data label vendors or do you have something in-house?

by lcnlvrz

3/2/2026 at 7:20:33 PM

Great question. We are building our entire labeling and data management system in house. Early on we tried existing platforms but they did not fit our workflow. We have a lot of video data and need custom labeling for things like keypoints, body outlines, and deformity classification that off the shelf tools do not handle well. Building it ourselves is cheaper at our scale, gives us tighter integration between labeling, training pipelines, and deployment, and lets us iterate faster. We can assign tasks to annotators, version datasets, and push models to edge devices from one system. When you are trying to close the loop between data collection on farm and deployment you cannot afford fragmented tooling.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 11:55:03 AM

Let me know if you are hiring. I'm based in Norway and did my masters in AI computer vision (object detection, segmentation). Have also published a paper in medical imaging, as well as sold my AI webapp/SaaS for six figures $ some months ago (the startup was not in CV, but in transcription/LLM/media monitoring).

by steinvakt2

3/3/2026 at 3:53:54 PM

We are hiring, would love to chat if you have some time.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 6:38:58 AM

This is awesome. Specially loved the origin story. Have been to Goa a couple times, and never have I ever thought about all these from this angle. Currently I am working with a startup incubator in North East India, and we provide grants of upto $30,000 and have seen some good aquaculture ideas. Hope I can introduce the cohort with you some day.

Aqua startups need each other.

by reattend

3/3/2026 at 3:55:37 PM

Thank you! Goa has a way of making the ocean feel like part of everyday life. It is hard to grow up there and not think about fishing and seafood at some point.

Would love to connect with your cohort. North East India has a ton of freshwater aquaculture potential and we are always looking to learn from founders working in different geographies and species.

You are right that aqua startups need each other. The industry is so fragmented and underserved that collaboration makes more sense than competition at this stage.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 6:09:48 PM

You are working in the wrong direction. There is not point into grabbing live fishes with a robotic hand. In fact, I would strongly advise against trying this approach in hatcheries.

by pvaldes

3/3/2026 at 8:11:24 PM

We are usually interacting with anesthetized fish and farms are already doing manual tasks with this. We are also integrating camera's into existing workflow that do not handle the fish to improve a farms insight into their own farms.

There are many tasks within farms that are extremely manual that are a bottleneck, this is especially prevalent in offshore farms and marine species.

by rohxnsxngh

3/4/2026 at 9:53:58 AM

You should aim to improve or replace this parts, not mimic it.

Ask yourself: why are they sampling those fishes? Most probably just to take two measures: Weight and size. Age is known and fixed so if you know the three values, you can use conversion grow tables to know if the fish is growing well or not. Measure and weight an object without touching it directly is yet a solved problem. Clove oil lasts only for a while so being faster than a human should be also an objective. Reducing the human exposure to cold with automated work is also a desired goal.

But sampling all the fishes or 60% of them shouldn't be necessarily your main objective, because statistical benefits and cons are unbalanced with a biggest sample. You just would skyrocket the risk for having a few decimals extra of precision. Small sample here is a feature, not a bug.

by pvaldes

3/4/2026 at 3:31:00 PM

You are right that for basic growth monitoring weight and size are the core measurements and statistical sampling is sufficient. We are actually testing underwater deployment for exactly that use case. Biomass estimation, feeding behavior tracking, population density. Non-contact measurement where the fish stay in the water.

But when you move into broodstock selection the requirements are completely different. It is not just weight and size anymore. Farms care about genotyping, body shape ratios, fin integrity, and overall quality markers that predict how well offspring will perform. You need detailed phenotypic data on individual fish and you want as many individuals as possible to improve selection accuracy. Marine species add another layer of complexity. Deformities are a major problem. Vertebral curvature, operculum malformations, color abnormalities. These are not things you can measure with a camera underwater. Farms are already taking fish out of the water for these inspections and doing it manually. We are not introducing handling where it did not exist. We are helping automate and track what they are already doing by hand.

The goal is to match the approach to the task. Underwater non-contact for biomass and behavior. Controlled environment with handling for broodstock phenotyping and deformity inspection. Different problems require different solutions.

by rohxnsxngh

3/4/2026 at 5:05:40 PM

> Deformities are a major problem

That

by pvaldes

3/2/2026 at 8:44:42 PM

Have you familiarized yourself with Whooshh Innovations? They have been operating in this space for over a decade and have solved many of these problems. It is an interesting space for sure! Best of luck!

by bahmboo

3/2/2026 at 9:44:29 PM

Thank you!

Whoosh has really interesting tech more focused on the fish transport side with products that move fish from tank to tank while performing some operations.

Our initial focus with inspection is taking high quality images of fish to pull insights needed for maximizing efficiency and improving breeding programs. We have designed our system to easily drop-in to the current operations so it is seamless.

by Pgrech

3/3/2026 at 1:34:41 PM

this is cool, I used to work in ag robotics and understand the economics require bravery, and loads of project finance eventually?

one thing: the fish cursor on the site is frustrating pls allow disabling.

by reality_inspctr

3/3/2026 at 3:54:48 PM

yes it's definitely capital intensive for sure. feedback on the website is noted, will make the changes on the next release.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 8:17:00 AM

this is just an objectively cool application of technology and some hardcore engineering. nice stuff guys

by jmcallister

3/3/2026 at 3:59:43 PM

thank you, appreciate it

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 6:40:59 PM

Shinkei was for the rich; you guys make it for all

by dogclaw

3/2/2026 at 6:49:54 PM

Shinkei definitely has cool tech! Aquaculture has already surpassed commercial fishing in terms of production and has become the cheapest source of protein in many countries. We are excited to help the industry grow even further.

by Pgrech

3/2/2026 at 10:11:43 PM

> The math of feeding 10 billion people only works if we farm the ocean

Even for marketing puffery, "only" seems reductive when most resource usage seems specific to a few animal products like cows and lamb: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

by myroon5

3/2/2026 at 11:42:19 PM

The broader point we were trying to make is that as population grows and arable land decreases, the protein mix will need to shift. Fish have a feed conversion ratio of around 1.0 to 1.5 compared to 6 to 10 for beef. They do not require land for grazing and aquaculture has significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than most terrestrial livestock. That does not mean aquaculture is the only path forward but it is likely a bigger part of the equation than it is today, especially in regions where seafood is already a primary protein source. We are not arguing against plant based diets or other solutions. Just that aquaculture is underinvested relative to its potential and the infrastructure to scale it efficiently does not exist yet. That is the gap we are trying to fill.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 5:28:43 PM

The fish cursor is cute, but extremely annoying.

by chadash

3/2/2026 at 7:00:03 PM

I like it, but it should just be visual. It jacks my default scrollpad/mouse behavior, which is the annoying part.

by darkhorse13

3/2/2026 at 8:38:10 PM

Perhaps add a hook below the usual mouse real pointer and have a fish that is just a decoration that slowly swims to it.

by gus_massa

3/2/2026 at 8:48:12 PM

^ this

by chadash

3/2/2026 at 9:21:12 PM

interesting, I like the idea

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 8:30:38 PM

yup I got similar feedback from other batchmatches, gonna fix this.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 5:39:09 PM

Agreed. Feels icky. Made me want to leave the page as quickly as possible again.

by chfritz

3/2/2026 at 5:48:04 PM

We got a little too excited about the fish theme. Noted for the next iteration.

by rohxnsxngh

3/2/2026 at 5:38:04 PM

^ no way this was tested by anyone with eyes before it was deployed

by m_w_

3/2/2026 at 5:43:32 PM

I am a fan of the fish cursor. We should make the internet quirky again. This is like a modern take on Geocities websites, and they should do things like fish cursors now while they still can before a board of VCs comes in and makes them remove the fish cursor.

by ginkgotree

3/2/2026 at 5:46:32 PM

Ha, thank you. We figured if we are building robots for fish we might as well commit to the bit. Enjoy it while it lasts.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 4:09:27 AM

[dead]

by helpus1234

3/2/2026 at 11:06:55 PM

[dead]

by CagedJean

3/2/2026 at 9:11:37 PM

[flagged]

by Serginusa

3/2/2026 at 9:19:05 PM

Thanks! The quantization tradeoffs have been a grind. We do not have an exact number but we found that a few thousand images was not enough once you account for the variance on farm. Lighting changes throughout the day, water clarity shifts between feedings, fish density varies by tank. Early on our calibration sets were too homogenous and the INT8 models would work great in testing and then fall apart when conditions shifted.

We also found that segmentation required significantly fewer images compared to keypoint pose detection models. Segmentation generalizes faster since you are just finding body boundaries. Keypoints are more finicky because anatomical landmarks vary a lot more across species, life stages, and body deformation while swimming. We had to be much more intentional about diversity in the keypoint training data. What made the difference overall was building calibration sets that intentionally captured edge cases. Low light, high turbidity, dense occlusion, different life stages. We also started stratifying by time of day and tank conditions rather than just grabbing random frames. It is still not perfect but the models are much more stable now.

by rohxnsxngh

3/3/2026 at 12:58:23 PM

Don't you find transformer based models perform better? Are they too heavy?

by steinvakt2

3/3/2026 at 4:01:25 PM

they're heavy but we have some post processing tasks related to the smoothness of the countours created by the labels. sometimes CNNs do not have smooth segmentation. We do various calculations to determine deformities or welfare indicators on a fish. For that we need some smoother contours.

Given that, we have trained a variety of models and we are still experimenting on what works the best. We are even considering using VLMs for certain tasks if we can fine-tune them well enough.

by rohxnsxngh