Somewhere in Southeast Asia or Latin America, there is a farmer standing on the bank of a shrimp pond, looking at thousands of small crustaceans swimming around and thinking there must be a better way to count them.
Now, thanks to an idea that originated in the Chesapeake Bay, there might be.
The company is called Minnowtech, and according to founder Suzan Shahrestani, its device looks like a “mini-fire hydrant” set inside a bucket of concrete. Farmers can drop the fire hydrant into a pond and get data on their phone or computer within an hour about the biomass of shrimp.
That data can inform a farmer about how much food to put in the pond. It could detect disease if there’s a sudden population decrease. It can be used to estimate how many pounds of shrimp are in a pond so that a processor can prepare for harvest.
“This is a true pain point [for shrimp farmers],” Shahrestani told the BBJ. “And if we get it right, we’re solving a huge problem for them.”
Shahrestani got the idea of using computers to count marine animals when she was in the fourth year of a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. She was part of a team using sonar to count jellyfish in the Chesapeake Bay. The sonar created thousands of images that the students went through manually to count jellyfish.
Around that same time, Shahrestani said an adviser urged her to learn how to code and the Bronx native decided that she wanted something more fast-paced and “wild west” than academia.
A few years ago, Shahrestani entered the Ratcliffe Environmental Entrepreneur Fellowship in Annapolis. She also met Ken Malone of Early Charm Ventures in Baltimore. According to Shahrestani, Malone had already been talking with German investors about aquaculture.
“He had heard shrimp biomass was a problem over and over and over again,” she said. “And this was two years before he met me.”
To Shahrestani, teaching a computer how to count shrimp in a pond sounded much easier than jellyfish in the Chesapeake. There was a known volume of water, a single species in that water, and no tires floating around. Shahrestani, along with Malone and Kelli Booth of Early Charm Ventures, founded Minnowtech.
Since then, Minnowtech has been working to develop a prototype that Shahrestani says is now counting shrimp with 95% accuracy. A commercial version manufactured in the U.K. by OTAQ Group could be ready for sale by the end of Q1 next year, she said.
Minnowtech declined to disclose a price tag on the device, but Malone, Minnowtech’s chairman, said it will save farmers money.
"Many shrimp farmers will realize a $6K feed savings per year per pond using our device. In addition, they'll be able to better time harvests to pricing fluctuations in the market and will be able to detect disease events earlier mitigating total crop losses,” Malone said in a statement. “Our pricing will reflect the value that we create."
According to its website, Minnowtech has received about $1.2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and $600,000 in seed financing so far.
Minnowtech has six full-time employees right now, Shahrestani said, though the company is preparing to scale up. There’s one data scientist in Baltimore and most of the team is in Hawaii, the only state to have year-round outdoor shrimp farming. About once a quarter, Shahrestani comes to Baltimore, where Early Charm Ventures is based. She was back this fall for a presentation at BlueTechMD’s inaugural conference at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
Shahrestani said she’s excited about developments in Baltimore entrepreneurial scene and would like to bring more jobs to the area.
