The problem
Feed is the dominant cost in fish farming, yet Indonesian smallholders fed ponds by hand with no measurement of appetite or water quality — wasting feed, polluting ponds, and inviting disease. Without records or collateral, the same farmers could not borrow formally and sold through layers of middlemen.
How it works
Founded in Bandung in 2013 by Gibran Huzaifah with co-founder and CPO Chrisna Aditya, eFishery built IoT automatic feeders that dosed feed and monitored pond conditions, then expanded into an end-to-end platform: the eFarm and eFisheryKu monitoring apps, feed supply, loans through eFishery Fund, and market access for harvested fish and shrimp. The story carried it to a $90M Series C in 2022 and a $200M Series D in 2023 at a $1.4B valuation — Indonesia’s first aquaculture unicorn, backed by SoftBank, Temasek, 42XFund and others.
Pain points
Blind overfeeding and feed waste, late disease detection, zero access to bank credit, and buyers dictating farm-gate prices.
Business model
Feeder hardware and software fees, feed-distribution margins, interest on farmer micro-loans, and take rates on fish traded through its marketplace.
Challenges
The mission was cover for large-scale fraud: investigators found dual books since 2018, a network of founder-linked shell companies forging invoices and round-tripping funds, and 400,000 claimed feeders against ~24,000 real ones. Both co-founders were ousted in December 2024; the company fired 100 staff in January 2025 and ~300 more in February amid closure rumors; the ex-CEO admitted falsifying data by March 2025 with roughly $300M in investor funds unaccounted for, and police detained him and two former executives in August 2025. The company is defunct.
Funding
- Raised: $90M Series C (2022, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Sequoia India) and a $200M Series D (2023) — over $294M from 28 institutional investors in total (Stratsea, TechCrunch via Wikipedia).
- Valuation: $1.4B at the 2023 Series D.
Latest — May 2026
A May 2026 analysis of the case put the bottom line in investigative record: close to $600M of reported revenue did not exist, revenue was overstated roughly fivefold, and a reported profit masked a material loss — making eFishery Indonesia’s largest startup fraud and a standing warning on private-market disclosure.