Tech
Founders Fund’s outlier bet on humanely killed fish
Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s newest StrictlyVC event in El Segundo, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a conversation that kept circling back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a venture event: How do you know if a fish is stressed out?
It’s a fair question for Khawaja to field, since his company, Shinkei, has built its entire business around the answer. Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon that fishermen install on their boats. The machine scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species, and locates the brain. Within seconds of the fish coming out of the water, it pierces the brain and severs the gills, so the fish dies before it can thrash or suffocate.
That matters because a slow death floods the meat with stress hormones and lactic acid, which dull flavor and shorten shelf life. The whole thing is an automated, industrial-scale version of ike jime, a centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally performed dockside by trained fishermen at the moment of catch. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the flesh to be safely aged for days, sometimes longer, before it’s served. That aging period is what gives top-tier sashimi its concentrated, umami-heavy flavor, as enzymes slowly break down the muscle.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family in the Middle East, and the idea Shinkei didn’t click until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If Fish Could Scream.” Its premise was that fish lack vocal cords, so the suffering most of them experience on the way to your plate is essentially invisible. Conventional commercial fishing typically lets fish suffocate on deck, a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to roughly an hour. During that time, fish release stress compounds that shorten shelf life and dull flavor, the same basic mechanism that makes a stressed cow produce tougher, less flavorful beef.
But Shinkei’s ambitions have expanded well past the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvester and processor, deploying robotics and AI across the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free, then pays those fishermen a premium price for the fish that come out of them, well above what the catch would fetch at a standard dock auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full possession of the fish rather than letting fishermen sell it on the open market. The catch then ships to a 16,000-square-foot plant Shinkei bought in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand, Seremoni, marketed as “ceremony grade” fish.
The most visible proof point so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni Grade Miso Black Cod, hot off the prepared-foods bar, and the marketing around it leans hard on the “sustainably caught, humanely harvested” framing. The arrangement is still a pilot, running for now out of Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location, with wider rollout to other stores contingent on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants holding a combined 50 Michelin stars, and claims something that has reportedly never happened before: Japan importing American-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as distinctly inferior to the domestic product.
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, the way many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, is still an open question, and even Khawaja treats it as secondary to the pitch when asked about this. He told the El Segundo crowd the real selling point isn’t the animal-welfare story so much as the practical one. A catch that might normally have a 5-to-7-day shelf life can stretch to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after coming out of the water with no issue. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, tries to quantify that by scanning fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each one. That matters in an industry where, by Khawaja’s estimate, roughly 18% of product is lost to spoilage just between dock and store, before retail loss is even counted.
That spoilage problem is tangled up with a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A meaningful share of fish caught in U.S. waters by U.S. boats gets frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive work of heading, gutting, scaling and filleting, then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates of how much American seafood is imported run as high as 90%, though roughly half of that, by some estimates, actually originated in domestic waters before making the round trip abroad. Reporting has tied parts of China’s seafood processing sector to forced labor, including Uyghur workers in Shandong province and North Korean labor in Liaoning, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor scrutiny in recent years. There’s been a push within the industry to “re-shore” some of that processing, spurred partly by tariffs and pandemic-era disruptions that made the China round trip less attractive.
The bet that Shinkei — and Founders Fund — are making is that re-shoring the entire chain, catch, kill, process, and distribute, all under one roof in Tacoma, can be done profitably enough to outcompete it.
For Founders Fund, the wager fits a pattern the firm has leaned into for years, which is backing founders who are often outside of fashionable categories. Asparouhov, who speaks a mile a minute and without reserve, put it plainly: there’s essentially nobody else on Earth who wants to spend their life on robots that kill fish, and the smell of the office makes that clear enough. (It was a very funny line, though it undersells the field a little. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese firm called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to assist humans performing ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish slaughter and processing. Shinkei’s edge, for now, is being the only one running the fully automated version of the technique at scale on U.S. boats.)
In fact, Asparouhov said the firm intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories like generic AI applications relatively low. By his rough math, AI and defense together account for something like 15% to 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimated is typical elsewhere in venture. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company making solar-powered, GPS-equipped cattle collars that let ranchers herd cattle remotely, and Ohalo Genetics, the crop-genetics company started by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as evidence that the firm’s appetite for food and agriculture isn’t a one-off.
Of course, the fund’s headline-grabbing recent win has nothing to do with fish. Its early and aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX — a relationship that traces back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal — are reported to have generated tens of billions of dollars for the firm, by some accounts the largest venture outcome ever recorded. Asparouhov argued that win has accelerated a broader shift in venture toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the largest companies on the Nasdaq today involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted more of SpaceX’s alumni, flush with liquidity and shaped by working alongside Musk, will go on to start their own ambitious physical-world companies.
Whether Shinkei becomes one of the firm’s next big wins will take time to know. The company is a robotics manufacturer and a seafood processor and a consumer brand, all running at once, and each layer has its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working a certain way. Distributors are built around decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery buyers still have to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. The hardware has to survive saltwater, fish guts, and life on a commercial boat, and the product it’s selling spoils, so there’s little room for the kind of stumble a software company can usually shrug off.
Still, talking with the two together in El Segundo was enough to make me understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The firm thinks it has found a founder building something novel in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry — the kind of company almost nobody else in the United States even wants to build.
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John Jumper, who shared a recent Nobel Prize in chemistry, announced Friday that he’s making the leap to Anthropic after “nearly 9 years” at Google DeepMind.
In a post on X, Jumper wrote that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science.”
Jumper (pictured above right, with Hassabis) added, “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.”
Bloomberg reports that Jumper was a key member of Google’s team developing coding tools, which the company has struggled to sell to businesses. Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced this week that he’s leaving DeepMind — though in Shazeer’s case, he’s joining OpenAI.
Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences.
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While Apple’s new Siri AI and Apple Intelligence announcements dominated the WWDC spotlight earlier this month, the tech giant also packed iOS 27 with a number of upgrades across its everyday apps and services, including smarter bill splitting in Apple Wallet, new ways to share locations in Find My, and improved Apple Maps features.
Apple Maps
Apple introduced an improvement to “Flyover,” the feature that provides immersive 3D views of cities and landmarks. The feature has been refreshed with more detailed visuals and smoother navigation.
The company also launched “Local Lists,” a new way for users to discover and save recommendations for restaurants, attractions, and other spots within Maps by seeing what’s trending. This could be Apple’s way to entice users away from using third-party apps for local exploration, like Google Maps or even Instagram and TikTok.
Find My
Find My is becoming more flexible with new location-sharing controls. Beginning this fall, users will be able to share their location for a custom amount of time, whether that’s a few minutes, several hours, multiple days, or until a specific date and time.
Apple is also adding the ability to temporarily pause location sharing with individual contacts until the end of the day. The changes are designed for various situations, like keeping a surprise birthday party under wraps.
Apple Wallet
Apple Wallet is getting a significant boost. One of the standout additions allows users to scan receipts using their iPhone camera and automatically split bills with friends using Apple Cash. Powered by Apple Intelligence, the feature can identify individual items on a receipt, calculate each person’s share of taxes and tips, and facilitate repayment directly through Messages or Wallet.
Wallet is also gaining support for digitizing physical membership and loyalty cards. Users can simply point their iPhone camera at a barcode or scan a digital card to save it directly into Wallet. Support is extending to Apple Watch, so passes can even be pinned to the Apple Watch Smart Stack for faster retrieval.
Travelers will benefit from a revamped hotel key experience. In addition to unlocking rooms and amenities with an iPhone or Apple Watch, guests staying at participating hotels and resorts will be able to access trip details, activity schedules, service information, and real-time updates directly within Wallet.
Apple Pay
Apple Pay is receiving a redesigned checkout experience online and in apps. Users will be able to swipe between payment cards more easily while viewing information such as rewards balances, debit account balances, and available pay-later options. Later this year, Apple says users will also be able to add funds directly to eligible debit cards through Wallet or during Apple Pay checkout.
For merchants, Apple is expanding “Tap to Pay” on iPhone with a new feature called “Tap to Share.” Customers can connect directly with participating merchants using a simple tap to securely share information such as loyalty accounts, shipping addresses, and contact details.
Apple Music
Apple Music is expanding the “Lyrics Translation” feature to support seven additional language pairings, including English translations for songs in French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Japanese. “Lyrics Pronunciation” will now help users sing along to songs in languages they may not speak by displaying phonetically translated lyrics across five new language pairings.
The “AutoMix” feature, which automatically creates smoother transitions between songs, is being enhanced with more immersive mixes and is expanding beyond iPhone to Apple TV and HomePod. Apple Music subscribers are also getting access to Hi-Res Lossless Audio on Apple TV 4K, allowing users with compatible sound systems to experience studio-quality audio through tvOS.
Apple Podcasts
Podcast listeners are getting a few welcome upgrades. A new “search within show” feature allows users to search directly through episodes of a specific podcast across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and the web. Apple is also bringing video podcasts to both Mac and Apple TV, reflecting the growing popularity of video-first podcasting.
iCloud Shared Albums
Fitness+
Fitness+ is launching “Strong Through Menopause,” a three-week program featuring guided Yoga and Strength workouts designed to help people navigating perimenopause and menopause build strength, improve mobility and balance, and manage stress. Apple is also adding a new “Time to Walk” episode featuring actor Busy Philipps, who shares personal stories about her experiences with perimenopause.
All these features are available for developers to test right now through the Apple Developer Program, with a public beta arriving next month.
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Salome Mikadze-Struk is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she built a software-development business as an undergraduate at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running despite the outbreak of war in her native Ukraine. Now, she’s drawing on her experiences to mentor tech-startup founders and speak publicly about the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship.
Mikadze-Struk was studying at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., when COVID-19 struck. Classes went online, and she moved back to Ukraine. In the midst of that disruption she saw an opportunity to develop her business idea, called Movadex, by tapping Ukraine’s pool of talented young engineers. Then Russia invaded in early 2022, during her final semester. Taking online classes from bomb shelters and helping employees evacuate to safer parts of the country was surreal, she says, but the team kept the company afloat and she graduated later that year.
In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took a hiatus from her business to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, which she completed this year. In her precious spare time she’s been advising startups and giving talks, using her unique perspective to promote the need for resilience in entrepreneurship—something she thinks is increasingly important in the software industry as AI coding tools upend old business models.
“You need to be okay with risk, you need to be resilient. You need to be okay with disruption and okay with uncertainty,” she says, “because this is inevitably going to be part of this industry for the foreseeable future.”
An Early Focus on Education
Mikadze-Struk’s parents had settled in Ukraine after fleeing conflict in the Abkhazia region of Georgia in the early 1990s. “They left everything behind,” she says. “You can look on Google Maps and zoom in on where their houses were and it’s all rubble.”
Despite this backstory, Mikadze-Struk says she and her sister had a conventional middle-class upbringing in Kyiv. Her father ran a small shop and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her parents placed an emphasis on education and encouraged her to study hard and take part in extracurricular programs such as Ukraine’s Junior Academy of Sciences, which introduces students to research.
“They weren’t rich, so they knew that our way to make it in life was not through investments, but through merit-based accomplishments,” she says.
When Mikadze-Struk was 14, her family discovered the newly launched Ukraine Global Scholars program, a nonprofit that helps talented students secure scholarships abroad. The program helped her win a full scholarship to the Emma Willard School, a private girl’s school in Troy, N.Y.
Discovering Tech
After graduating high school in 2018, Mikadze-Struk was accepted to Georgetown to study business administration. But it was outside the classroom that her career direction began to take shape. She won a startup competition with a medical device she had developed for a school project and, while the business idea didn’t go anywhere, it sparked an interest in entrepreneurship.
Ukraine’s software industry was booming, and she began attending startup events and competitions in her home country the summer before starting college. There she met her eventual cofounder Nor Newman.
Despite both being just 18, they saw a gap in the market. The pair noticed many founders had strong ideas but lacked the technical expertise to realize them, while talented engineering students often struggled to gain real-world experience. Newman had begun informally connecting startups with his college friends, but the pair soon saw commercial potential. “We realized we could actually create our own startup studio and help startups as a team, versus just connecting people,” says Mikadze-Struk.
Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, halfway through her sophomore year, it brought both disruption and opportunity for Newman and Mikadze-Struk. While travel restrictions and lockdowns made life complicated, there was also a surge of companies looking to move their business online. “COVID really skyrocketed everything we were doing,” she says.
Sensing an opportunity, Mikadze-Struk and Newman incorporated Movadex in Ukraine in early 2020. From the start, they decided to focus on not only providing engineering talent, but also helping startups with product development. Many times, says Mikadze-Struk, a founder’s vision for the software doesn’t line up with what users actually want. “What really helped us grow is not just the engineering or quality of code, but rather a holistic approach to creating a product and actually getting into the brain of the user,” she says.
Navigating Adversity
Back in Ukraine, Mikadze-Struk had to juggle this booming business with studying remotely—taking classes at night and working during the day. It was exhausting, she says, but it also allowed her to immediately apply what she learned in business classes to building her startup.
Having successfully navigated the pandemic, Mikadze-Struk was dealt another wild card. In early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and her life was again turned upside down. It was particularly traumatic for her family, having already been forced from their home in Georgia once by war.
In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took an extended leave from her company to pursue an MBA at Stanford.Christie Hemm Klok
“For my parents to experience their daughters going through all the same things they had gone through was really heartbreaking,” she says. “But at the same time, because I’d heard so much about their story of resilience I had power in me to not fully break down.”
On the day of the invasion the founders told employees to take the day off and emailed clients to warn of potential disruptions. The next couple of days were spent checking on staff and evacuating as many as possible to their headquarters in Lviv, in Western Ukraine.
By the following Monday the business was back up and running. Soon afterward, they partnered with the Lviv IT Cluster business association’s nonprofit arm to help resettle refugees from the eastern part of Ukraine, where strikes were focused, and offer job placements. Throughout this period, Mikadze-Struk was also completing her final year at Georgetown remotely. “Half of my senior year was actually spent in bomb shelters,” she says.
Promoting Resilience in Entrepreneurship
That summer, Mikadze-Struk graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and learned she had been accepted onto Stanford University’s MBA program. In 2023, she took an extended leave from Movadex and moved to California. She also gave birth to her daughter in 2024.
Balancing studies and parenthood was already a full-time job, but she continued to engage with the startup ecosystem by volunteering as a startup mentor and public speaker. Now, after graduating from Stanford, she is stepping back into a more active leadership role at Movadex, where she hopes to drive the company’s expansion into the United States. She also wants to develop a stronger focus on helping customers understand and implement AI in their businesses.
While AI is undeniably disrupting the tech industry, Mikadze-Struk, now an IEEE Senior Member, is fundamentally optimistic about its impact. “The way AI democratized access to building software and to prototyping…is just mind blowing,” she says.
But it will require a significant shift in mind-set for engineers, especially junior developers hunting for jobs. They need to “fall in love with AI” and embrace it as a powerful copilot, she says. As these tools increasingly take over the nuts-and-bolts work of coding, engineers also need to nurture higher-level skills like systems thinking and architectural design.
Perhaps most importantly, given the rapid pace at which the technology is evolving, engineers need to nurture their adaptability and resilience. “It’s both exciting and scary, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
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