OptoScale nets $4.1m to grow its fish farm monitoring tech
Summary
“We’ve been really focused on making sure this works and it’s stable, so there are no unforeseen issues down the road, before raising venture funding,” CEO Sven Jørund Kolstø tells AFN. “My take on venture is that it’s for when you’re ready to really push the throttle in fully – [when you] just need more fuel to make the rocket fly.” Blue Ocean, a marine impact fund managed by France’s SWEN Capital Partners, led the round. Founded in 2015, the Trondheim-based startup began by offering sensor and optics technology that allows salmon farmers to accurately gauge the mass of their fish, without the need to use the more traditional — but not entirely practical — solution of weighing scales. “For one customer in Scotland, it took just 15 minutes for them to get it up and running; they brought up that one of our biggest competitors had taken three months.” OptoScale says it “leases” its units to farms, which pay for a software subscription under what Kolstø calls a hardware-as-a-service model. Another factor in OptoScale’s differentiation from competing aquaculture monitoring platforms is that it relies on edge computing — with data processing taking place within the units, rather than servers located somewhere else.