Atarraya launched its new system for shrimp farming on the US market. Shrimpbox is the aquaculture equivalent to agriculture’s vertical farming, which has an AI-powered automated system that remotely monitors water quality, regulates temperature and oxygenation, and feeds the shrimp without the need of specialized personnel.
The system offers farmers a viable new revenue source that delivers up to 10 times the ROI of poultry or swine farming and overcomes many of the challenges associated with traditional farming, including cost and environmental impact.
Shrimpbox integrates the best biotechnology, software, and hardware to produce fresh shrimp sustainably. The new system, which utilizes biofloc technology, has been designed to ensure consistent production and economic viability, even in countries with high labor costs.
The first Shrimpbox prototypes, assembled in Mexico, are already in operation. Furthermore, a Shrimpbox farm for training and demo purposes is also slated to open later this year in partnership with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC).
“We’ve spent the past 10 years diligently working to bring Shrimpbox to market and are now ready to begin rolling it out at an industry-level scale,” said Daniel Russek, CEO, and founder of Atarraya. “Our proprietary technology decreases the environmental impact and cost of traditional shrimp farming or trawling. It allows for the production of fresh, sustainable, and local shrimp farms to be set up anywhere in the world as a vertical aquaculture farm that generates nearly 10 times the return on investment to farmers,” Russek concluded.
“Atarraya has figured out how to grow animal protein in a natural, scalable, sustainable way,” said Gabriel Tolchinsky, an Atarraya investor. “The science, engineering, and technology that Atarraya has developed to grow shrimp in its Shrimpboxes, near population centers and away from oceans, is potentially revolutionary. The Shrimpbox mimics the wild habitat of shrimp and produces shrimp that taste great and consumers will crave; producing shrimp near big cities will also mean that consumers gain access to fresh, never frozen shrimp - truly game-changing.”
Atarraya raised a USD 3.9 million Series A funding round at a post-Series A valuation of USD 41 million. The Series A funding was led by Jeffrey Horing and other angel investors, including Mark K. Gormley, Geoffry Kalish, Robert Stavis, and Robert Goodman, and brings Atarraya’s total funding to date to USD 10 million. The company will use the new funds to scale its proprietary Shrimpbox technology globally and to launch its U.S. headquarters in Indianapolis.
