Fishing Bigger Margins: How Aquapulse Is Solving Shrimp Farming’s Biggest Bottleneck

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Founded by fisheries graduate Abhishek Dwivedy, Aquapulse is building an AI-led shrimp farming and export platform from Odisha.
  • The startup works with over 6,000 small and marginal shrimp farmers, providing advisory, aggregation, and market-linkage services.
  • Backed by a recent ₹45 Cr funding round, Aquapulse is betting on exports and post-harvest value chains to differentiate itself in India's growing aquatech sector.
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India’s aquaculture sector has long struggled with a simple but costly problem: farmers produce high-value shrimp, but much of that value is lost before the product reaches the buyer. Inefficiencies in aggregation, post-harvest handling and market access continue to hold back both farmer incomes and export potential.

While studying fisheries science at the Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology in the 2010s, Abhishek Dwivedy began questioning why India, despite its long coastline and maritime history, accounted for only 5% of the global seafood market. 

After graduating, Dwivedy worked across the seafood value chain, including procurement, processing, quality management and exports, to learn the ropes of the trade. He later joined Solidaridad Network, where he worked with nearly 15,000 farmers across India and Bangladesh. 

This on-ground exposure helped him see the gap more clearly: fish farmers were creating value, but the system around them was not capturing enough of it. For him, the answer was not just about scale, but about building a more sustainable and profitable aquaculture system. 

“The first thing that needed to be safeguarded was what farmers were already producing. Technology alone couldn’t have solved that. It had to be accompanied by a physical presence on the ground,” said Dwivedy. 

This paved the way for Aquapulse. Founded in 2023 by Dwivedy and his sister-in-law, Ananya Mohapatra, and later joined by Dwivedy’s sibling, Abhilash, the startup is building a shrimp farming and export platform based in Odisha. Aquapulse combines farmer advisory, aggregation, and export market access on a single platform for fish farmers in the state. 

Inside The Genesis Of Aquapulse

Aquapulse began to take shape after Abhilash, who spent over a decade working at companies like Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science and FMC, returned to Bhubaneswar to build the venture.