Great Tech, Wrong Market: Lessons from the Billion-Dollar eFishery Bust

Yes, another billion dollar bust that is killing investor enthusiasm for the aquaculture sector.

In my recent efforts to raise capital for aquaculture production projects, I noticed a pattern. Time and again, investors expressed interest in enabling technologies rather than the core production itself. On the surface, it makes sense: enabling tech promises scale, efficiency, and the kind of high-margin, recurring-revenue business models associated with Software as a Service (SaaS). But what happens when the technology outpaces the very sector it’s supposed to empower?

The eFishery Mirage

eFishery, once heralded as a beacon of Southeast Asian agritech, provides a cautionary tale. At its peak, the Indonesian startup had achieved unicorn status, wooing major investors like SoftBank, Temasek, and Sequoia. Its smart feeders and integrated platforms for fish and shrimp farming were, by most accounts, technologically sound. But beneath the surface, the company was fabricating its metrics—inflating device deployments from 24,000 to 400,000, falsifying revenues, and maintaining dual sets of financial statements. The tech worked. The business model did not.

eFishery didn’t fail because it lacked a good product. It failed because expectations, investment narratives, and the pressure to scale led to systemic fraud. It’s a prime example of what happens when tech optimism collides with operational inertia.

Enabling Tech vs. Sector Maturity

Venture capital thrives on asymmetric returns, and enabling tech offers a seductive proposition: scalable tools, lower capital intensity, and the potential to transform entire industries. But when those industries are slow-moving, complex, and biologically constrained—like aquaculture or agriculture—tech can get ahead of its market.

Consider this archetype: a startup offers cutting-edge analytics or AI-powered automation for a production method that hasn't yet scaled commercially. The technology is impressive, even visionary. But the customer base? Fragmented. Adoption timelines? Measured in years, not quarters. The result is a business chasing growth in a market that doesn't exist yet—not at the scale required to support a high-burn tech model.

Why Agriculture and Aquaculture Are Structurally Slow Tech Adopters

Tech founders love disruption. Farmers love not dying of bankruptcy. That’s the first philosophical clash.

Unlike software, where iteration is fast and failure is cheap, agriculture and aquaculture deal with biological systems—plants, animals, and ecosystems—that operate on slower, seasonal cycles and don’t respond well to experimentation. Mistakes don’t lead to bug reports—they lead to dead crops or diseased fish.

Thin margins are another structural barrier. Most producers run on tight budgets, leaving little room for unproven technologies. Even in high margin markets (I’m looking at you, salmon industry), a pathological focus on EBIT margins leaves little spare cash for mistakes. A solution has to demonstrate real, immediate ROI, not just promise it in a deck.

There’s also the human factor. Farming and aquaculture are often generational trades. Operators tend to be conservative, not out of stubbornness, but because risk aversion is a survival trait in their world. Add to that patchy infrastructure, limited access to training, and tech vendors who don’t always understand their users, and you have a recipe for adoption timelines that stretch out over decades—not quarters.

So it’s not that these sectors are anti-tech; it’s that they require tech to be rugged, intuitive, and demonstrably useful under less-than-ideal conditions. Until then, adoption will lag.

The VC Mindset and ESG Illusions

Part of the problem lies in how venture capital applies a software-derived playbook to everything. Scalable platform? Check. High margins? Check. Repeatable revenue? Check. But in sectors grounded in biology and logistics, such as food production, these assumptions don’t always hold.

In ESG-focused investing, this becomes particularly acute. Investors chase technologies that promise sustainability metrics and impact KPIs, but often without verifying whether the market mechanics support those outcomes. The risk is not just financial misalignment, but a kind of ESG theater: great story, beautiful dashboard, zero traction.

Lessons from eFishery

The eFishery scandal was not the result of bad tech. It was a perfect storm of:

• Inflated investor expectations.

• Weak internal governance.

• A "fake it till you make it" culture that went too far.

• And a production sector that simply wasn’t scaling fast enough to support the narrative.

What makes it dangerous is that these factors aren't unique. They exist across many tech-first ESG startups. When the enabling tech is built for a market that hasn’t matured, the temptation to exaggerate traction grows.

What Investors Should Watch For

To avoid the next eFishery, investors need to anchor their optimism in operational reality. Key questions include:

• Has the core production sector reached scale?

• Is infrastructure in place to support widespread deployment?

• Are end-users (e.g., farmers, producers) actually using the tech, or just trialing it?

• What are the economic incentives for adoption, and are they strong enough?

And perhaps most importantly:

• Is the tech solving a real problem at scale, or just a hypothetical one in a PowerPoint slide?

Balancing the Equation: Direct Production Still Matters

The solution isn't to avoid enabling technology—but to invest in the foundations that make its adoption possible. That means funding direct production as well. Robust farms, proven operators, and real-world infrastructure are what turn enabling tech from a speculative bet into a scalable solution.

In aquaculture, direct production investments not only de-risk the enabling tech ecosystem, they also provide essential market feedback loops. Production builds the testbeds. It builds the users. It builds the industry that tech is supposed to enable. Ignoring production is like funding a train without laying any track.

Conclusion

eFishery’s collapse is a cautionary tale—but not a condemnation of enabling technology. It’s a reminder that no amount of investor enthusiasm can accelerate the biological, economic, and cultural realities of food production. Enabling technologies have a vital role to play in transforming ESG sectors, but they must be grounded in sector readiness, not just engineering ambition.

For investors looking at aquaculture and agriculture, the playbook must shift: Look for technologies that match the pace of the sector, that are built with deep operational understanding, and that scale not just on spreadsheets, but on farms. There’s real opportunity here—but only if we stop expecting biology to behave like software.

If you’re navigating this space and want a pragmatic view of where the real opportunities are—and how to separate traction from theater—I’m happy to connect. You can reach me in the comment section below, via LinkedIn, or at Info@AlanWCook.com.