Founders Fund’s outlier bet on humanely killed fish
Key takeaways
- It s a fair question for Khawaja to field, since his company, Shinkei, has built its entire business around the answer.
- That matters because a slow death floods the meat with stress hormones and lactic acid, which dull flavor and shorten shelf life.
- Khawaja s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch.
Earlier this week, at Tech Crunch s newest Strictly VC 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.