Biryani Johnson

My lightly redacted Series A memo for Shinkei (10/28/2024): Hey team, Planning to lead a Series A with a [redacted] check of a [redacted] round into Shinkei @ $50m post. Shinkei is building a fish processor, distributor, and end retail brand, enabled by their in-house robotic equipment + software. In mass processed fish today, the fish are killed via suffocation or freezing temperatures, which causes the fish significant stress, releasing toxins into the fish's body, significantly reducing the quality of the meat. Shinkei's first robot has perfected the mass automation of the Japanese shinkei method of killing fish, where you spike the brain, instantly killing the fish, preventing any stress, and then you drain the blood as well as remove the spinal cord. This is how all high-end sushi fish you've eaten was killed, entirely manually by dextrous experts they have on-deck on sushi-grade fishing boats. By automating the process, Shinkei is able to install their robot on traditional fisherman's boats, and then pay them to put their catch though their robot rather than selling to a traditional processor. Shinkei then sells this to distributors and through their own end retail brand, where they have both a quality advantage due to the taste of the fish (it was incredibly delicious to taste their cod during diligence), and cost advantage since the fish is much less sensitive to spoiling because of the lack of toxins. I've been tracking Saif, the CEO, for several years as he's worked on this and passed on the pre-seed / seed rounds, despite finding him quite compelling. Saif comes from a family history in fishing, and in order to get deeper into the industry, at the start of the company he actually went and spent 6 months on a relatively dangerous Atlantic fishing boat. The penultimate goal here is to build something akin to Cargill, which has dominated the poultry and beef industry, as a processor, distributor, wholesaler, initially with an edge on hardware development (grain elevators). In the short term, the major focus will be to increase the production of their fish killing robotics, and scale their fish brand, Seremoni with wholesalers and grocers. Macro-wise, I also like that shortly after the Starship landing, when most other VCs are funding ex-SpaceX teams tackling business models that are incredibly undifferentiated/competitve, or so far out that there's no path to venture returns, we're instead backing an ex-SpaceX team that will almost certainly face negligible venture-backed competition in the fishing industry.