SINGAPORE – UMITRON PTE. LTD. (Location: Singapore, Co-founder / Managing director Masahiko Yamada, hereinafter “Umitron“) announced that it has raised S$3.7mil funding from Mirai Creation Fund operated by SPARX Group. Co., Ltd. on 6th September as the additional closing of first enterprise equity finance announced on 8th June. The total investment in this round becomes S$15.2mil and would be the largest amount of fundraising as an early-stage startup in aquatech (as of September 2018). Umitron has also announced that it has started demonstrating new service to provide reliable data for aquaculture insurance. Umitron’s patent-pending technology enables users to quantify the asset value of fishes and provides environmental data for risk assessment. With an aim of expanding its services, Umitron currently invites overseas business partners such as enterprise aquafarms and insurance providers for sustainable aquaculture.
Manage aquaculture risk with technology
Marine aquaculture production could potentially be increased by over 100 times compared to today’s value by estimating location-specific growth potential using the temperature tolerance of aquaculture species with other important factors such as ocean depth.* On the other hand, one of the challenges is to find ways to support aquafarmers from environmental risk such as disaster on open-ocean. There have already been several insurances in Aquaculture today to reduce risk for farmers, but aquaculture insurance has been facing technical challenges to evaluate value of the fish insured as well as to accumulate environmental data from farming sites. Umitron’s patent-pending technology provides reliable data for aquaculture insurance and support farmers to keep their management risk to a minimum for sustainable aquaculture.
*Rebecca R. Gentry, et. al., Mapping the global potential for marine aquaculture, Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1
Based in Singapore (HQ) and Japan (R&D HQ), Umitron builds user & eco-friendly data platform in aquaculture to improve farm efficiency and manage environmental risk for sustainable ocean. In June 2017, Umitron launched “UmiGarden” as its initial product. UmiGarden provides feeding optimization in aquaculture through fish school analysis. Also, since August 2018, Umitron has started demonstrating data service for aquaculture insurance using IoT and satellite remote sensing to evaluate and mitigate risks associated with ocean environment and farm operations. Umitron aims to “install Sustainable Aquaculture on Earth“ and believes risk management is a key for sustainable aquaculture development.
