India Has a Long Coastline and a Tiny Share of Global Seafood.
Aquapulse Is Trying to Change That.
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India accounts for just 5% of the global seafood market. For a country with one of the longest coastlines in the world and a deep maritime history, that number bothered Abhishek Dwivedy deeply.
He had been asking the question since his time studying fisheries science at the Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology. After graduating, he spent years working across the seafood value chain, from procurement and processing to quality management and exports. He later joined Solidaridad Network, where he worked directly with nearly 15,000 farmers across India and Bangladesh.
What he saw on the ground was consistent: shrimp farmers were creating genuine value, but the system around them was capturing almost none of it. Poor aggregation, weak post-harvest handling, limited market access, and heavy dependence on intermediaries meant that most of the margin that should have gone to the farmer was being lost somewhere between the pond and the buyer.
"The first thing that needed to be safeguarded was what farmers were already producing. Technology alone could not have solved that. It had to be accompanied by a physical presence on the ground," Dwivedy says.
That conviction became Aquapulse.
Building From the Ground Up
Aquapulse was founded in 2023 by Dwivedy and his sister-in-law Ananya Mohapatra, and later joined by his sibling Abhilash, who had spent over a decade at companies including Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, and FMC before returning to Bhubaneswar to help build the venture.
The startup began as a shrimp advisory effort in coastal Odisha. Working with 300 to 400 farmers initially, the team focused on helping them adopt better aquaculture practices and produce export-grade shrimp. Over time, that consulting-led approach evolved into a full-stack digital and physical platform.
Today, Aquapulse works primarily with Vannamei shrimp farmers and serves around 6,000 farmers, with a target of 10,000 by the end of 2026. Its model is built on three pillars: aggregation, advisory, and market linkage.
Field teams onboard farmers, conduct random sampling, train them on cultivation practices, and monitor quality throughout the production cycle. Local aquapreneurs work directly with farmer clusters while the platform provides specialised guidance on shrimp cultivation, disease management, harvest planning, and seafood trade. Of Aquapulse's roughly 70 employees, a significant share of advisory and field staff hold qualifications in fisheries and aquaculture.
The impact on farmer economics has been meaningful. Participating farmers see gross margin gains of 7 to 8% in their first year, improving to 11 to 13% after export-led operations are introduced. Better harvest planning, lower feed costs, and access to premium overseas markets drive the improvement.
"A farmer can earn an additional Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh per pond per crop cycle, averaging three months, through improved planning, quality management, and market access, against an annual cost of about Rs 10 to 12 lakh," Abhishek says.
The Technology Behind the Platform
Aquapulse pairs its on-ground farmer network with a proprietary digital stack that spans the full aquaculture value chain.
Three modules power the platform. Pond Harvest tracks pond health, water quality, and harvest readiness. Shrimp Pro evaluates shrimp quality and export suitability, with AI-powered image analysis helping field teams assess quality and inform buying decisions. Export Intelligence analyses global demand, pricing trends, tariffs, and trade flows.
The export model is deliberate and unusual. Unlike traditional exporters who buy inventory first and then look for buyers, Aquapulse operates on a demand-led basis. By tracking stocking cycles and harvest timelines across its farmer network, the startup claims it can estimate the quantity, size, and quality of available shrimp weeks before harvest, allowing it to engage buyers and negotiate contracts before the product even leaves the pond.
Its trade intelligence portal draws on data from MPEDA, the FAO, and other sources to generate real-time market intelligence, buyer demand signals, pricing forecasts, and supply-demand analysis.
Cold-chain logistics round out the physical infrastructure. Aquapulse has developed a patented ice-slurry transport process designed to preserve shrimp quality from pond to processing facility, a critical differentiator in a category where post-harvest quality loss directly erodes margin.
The Business Today
Aquapulse buys harvests directly from farmers, carries out quality and compliance checks, and supplies export-grade, antibiotic-free shrimp to international buyers. It currently exports to Vietnam, China, and Japan, with plans to expand into the US and European markets.
The startup reported income of Rs 22 Cr with a profit of Rs 15 lakh in FY25. Earlier this month, it raised Rs 45 Cr in funding, including Rs 25 Cr from state-backed NABVentures and Rs 20 Cr from IAN Alpha Fund.
Plans are underway to expand processing capacity and develop a facility focused on value-added products including ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat seafood offerings. The startup is also looking to expand into black tiger shrimp, citing its antibiotic-free, pathogen-free profile and consistent sizing as commercial advantages.
The Competition and the Challenge Ahead
India's aquaculture startup ecosystem is active. Aquaconnect, AquaExchange, AquaSetu, and Blue Ponds Aqua are all working to modernise shrimp farming, and several have raised significantly more capital than Aquapulse.
Dwivedy's argument for differentiation is specific. While most aquaculture startups focus on pre-harvest services like farm inputs and advisory, Aquapulse's core strength lies in post-harvest market linkage, processing, and exports. It is also deliberately focused on small and marginal farmers, a segment he believes is largely underserved by the competition.
The challenge ahead is real. Seafood exports are cyclical, exposed to fluctuations in global demand, trade regulations, and disease outbreaks. Scaling a market-linkage model while consistently generating margins for thousands of smallholder farmers is genuinely hard.
Whether Aquapulse can sustain its profitability and farmer-income gains at scale will be the defining question of its next phase.
Vyapaarवाणी Takeaway : The Most Overlooked Opportunity in Agri-Tech Is Often After the Harvest
India's agri-tech conversation tends to focus on the farm: better seeds, smarter inputs, precision irrigation, crop advisory. These are important. But for farmers growing high-value export crops like shrimp, the farm is only half the story.
The other half is market access. Without a reliable route to buyers who will pay a premium for quality, even the best-farmed shrimp ends up being sold through intermediaries at a fraction of its potential value. That margin erosion is not a farming problem. It is a market-linkage problem.
Aquapulse's full-stack approach, combining on-ground advisory with demand-led aggregation, export intelligence, and cold-chain logistics, is an attempt to solve both halves of the equation simultaneously. The early results, profitable in year two with meaningful farmer income gains, suggest the model is working at current scale.
The question is whether it can work at ten times the scale. In a category as complex and cyclical as seafood exports, that is a much harder thing to prove.
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