Water quality is the most important thing that farms monitor to maintain the health of their livestock. There are existing methods to monitor water quality, such as sensors and water testing kits, but they are too expensive for many farmers in regions such as Southeast Asia.
Aquawise wants to give aquaculture farmers in Southeast Asia a better way to monitor water quality using AI and existing satellites. No hardware purchase required.
Bangkok-based Aquawise takes satellite images of fish and shrimp farms and feeds them into a physically-based AI model that monitors water temperature, chlorophyll levels, oxygen levels, and more.
Aquawise’s platform can continuously monitor water quality. Traditional methods involve daily or weekly monitoring. Aquawise also provides tracking and forecasting.
“Water quality is one of the most important things in aquaculture,” Patipond Tiyapunjanit, co-founder and CEO of Aquawise, told TechCrunch. “It’s similar to being a human. You have to breathe. Aquatic organisms live in water all the time. If water quality isn’t maintained at optimal levels, it can cause stress, disease, and a variety of other things.”
Aquawise will be showcasing its technology as part of this year’s Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 from October 27th to 29th at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Tiyapunjanit, 19, said the idea for the company started with a love for shrimp, which led to a research project on shrimp larvae.
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While presenting his project at the 2023 Young Scientists Competition, he met co-founders Chanati Jantrachotechawan and Kobchai Duangrattanarath, who were advising a rival team. Jantrachotechatchawan and Duangrattanalert were so impressed with Tiyapunjanit that they ended up advising him on his project, which won first place at the 2024 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair.
The trio then had to figure out what to do next.
“We have to take a step back and find out the most important issues in our industry,” Tiyapunjanit said. “We’ve discovered that this is a water quality problem. 80% of aquaculture farms today face this problem. It causes almost $30 billion in losses every year.”
This became the basis for Aquawise, which was founded in 2024.
Duangrattanalert told TechCrunch that while water quality isn’t such a big issue for farms in regions like the US and Europe, it’s a much bigger issue in developing regions like Southeast Asia. Despite the potential impact of poor water quality, farmers in the region cannot afford monitoring technology and instead rely on weather forecasts and manual water checks.
The original idea for Aquawise was to use sonar to monitor water quality, Duangrattanalert said. Their initial idea was to use acoustic sonar to capture data from the water, and they even tested it in Tiyapunjanit’s fish tank at home, but then realized that was too much of an economic hurdle for farmers.
“We want people in Thailand in particular, and across Southeast Asia (the region), to feel like they can use it to improve their livelihoods from a community, regional and farm-wide perspective,” Duangrattanarat said.
Aquawise works with multiple farms and continues to train its AI models using the data it collects. The company wants to make sure its model is accurate before it starts selling to farms.
The company plans to raise funds from investors in the new year as well.
“Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector in the world today,” Tiyapunjanit said. “It is one of the industries predicted by the United Nations to be the best way to feed 10 billion people in the next few years because it can produce high nutrition with very low emissions.”
If you want to learn directly from Aquawise, check out dozens of additional pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, visit here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, taking place October 27-29 in San Francisco.
