'We're past this': After fraud halved its assets, aquaculture investor eyes next bets

When the aquaculture sector's first and only unicorn collapsed in scandal last year, it almost took its earliest investor down with it.

eFishery, the Indonesian agritech darling backed by SoftBank and Temasek, had reached a $1.4bn valuation. But in December 2024, a whistleblower exposed what investigators later found to be widespread fraud. The inquiry found the startup had inflated its revenues by $600m, ran dual financial books for years, and widely overstated how many fish-feeders it had actually installed.

Aqua-Spark, the Amsterdam-based aquaculture fund, was one of eFishery’s earliest investors, leading its $550k seed round back in 2015 and re-investing multiple times after that.

Maria Velkova, Aqua-Spark's chief portfolio officer, doesn't shy away from how hard it hit. "It was really emotional… and it was also return-related," she says.

As reported by trade magazine Intrafish, the collapse forced Aqua-Spark to slash its 2024 asset valuation by nearly half, to around €260m.

Aqua-Spark only made one new investment in 2025, according to Dealroom data. But now, after a tumultuous period at the firm, the launch of a new fund points to a ramp up of activity, and Velkova says the team is optimistic about what comes next.

'Our investors backed us'

The temptation after something like eFishery is to rip up the due diligence playbook and start again.

Velkova says Aqua-Spark did examine its processes. But the more they looked, the less they believed it would have made a difference.

"Even if we had adopted all the lessons learned, we still don't think there is much we could have done," she says. "It was a very well-executed fraud, including a team within the team dedicated only to maintaining a second set of books.”

However, the business model, she insists, was real.

"If they didn't become greedy, they could have grown it, just at a slower pace,” she says. "They weren't a fake business. They just wanted to become something quicker."

The company had 3,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers engaged on the ground at its peak.

Velkova repeatedly insists that eFishery was an isolated case, and wasn't a reflection of the broader sector.

"Everybody knew about eFishery, and unfortunately that gave people who had been critical about [aquaculture] to say, ‘I told you so.’ But that isn't really justified."

She says that Aqua-Spark's LPs were understanding of the situation.

"Our investor base stood up and backed us and continued believing in this industry," she says. "We had big worries that this could have a ripple effect on the industry as a whole, because it's a fragile thing."

For Velkova personally, the past year has been a lot to process.

"It felt like a Netflix documentary I was experiencing from the inside," she says. "In one year you've seen or experienced something that felt like five years but I really feel like we're past this now."

Where the industry is at now

Aqua-Spark was founded in 2015 by Dutch serial entrepreneur Mike Vailings and Amy Novogratz, formerly of the TED Prize. The fund has always run as an open-ended structure, one of very few in the early-stage aquaculture space, partly because the sector's long testing cycles and regulatory timelines can make conventional VC horizons a difficult fit.

"There have been many cases where early-stage capital entered this space expecting startups to behave like software companies," says Velkova. "Investors realised they couldn't underwrite something based on biology with that kind of return profile. That mind shift is already happening, and it's what has been helping this industry."

The fund's 24 portfolio companies span the full value chain, from alternative feed ingredients using microbial fermentation, to bacterial phage therapies replacing antibiotics. After a decade of backing the innovation phase, Velkova says the focus has shifted somewhat.

"Five years ago we were asking: can this technology actually work? Can this alternative feed ingredient be suitable for aquafeed? Are there tools that can replace antibiotics? Now those questions are answered. The question is how do we scale these technologies and how does this industry absorb them?"

Velkova emphasises the importance of patient capital in this space.

"Slow doesn't necessarily mean it's not working,” she says. “Maybe it needs a little more time to stabilise. If you want to test a technology on salmon and validate it through to harvest, you're looking at at least 18 months for one cycle. Those are just the quirks of this asset class."

Africa, growth capital, and what's next

Following the stabilisation work of 2025, Aqua-Spark is now moving into what Velkova describes as a more outward-looking phase.

The firm has a three-stage plan for capital deployment: continued early-stage innovation funding, a new growth vehicle for maturing portfolio companies moving into large-scale production, and a dedicated regional fund for Africa.

As Impact Loop previously reported in March, Aqua-Spark has already marked a first close of its Africa fund at $48m, with a longer-term target of $250m over the next decade. LPs include KfW, the EU-funded Agriculture Financing Initiative, Gatsby Africa, and the Livelihood Impact Fund. The open-ended fund will invest across farming, feed, genetics, and cold storage, with a focus on building regional industry hubs.

The rationale is straightforward: Africa's protein gap is growing fast, the aquaculture infrastructure barely exists, and the window to build it properly is open right now.

"This industry in Africa is still at a point where you can mould it into something done the right way, before it escalates and you find yourself in a situation where you can't fix it anymore," Velkova says. "Innovation, growth, and regional capital. If you structure it like this, you can attract the investors who have appetite for the respective profile."

eFishery rattled a fragile space. But Velkova's read on where aquaculture sits now isn't one of retreat. The technology works, many companies are doing well, and the capital stack looks to be finally catching up with the biology.

"I hope the next cycle is going to make this a little bit less niche, and a little bit more mainstream," she says.