Anticipate disease outbreaks in fish farming

With a growing demand for protein sources, aquaculture is postulated as a sustainable solution to meet this market need.

However, fish farms are facing serious problems of fish mortality and/or the need to treat diseases with antibiotics, as there is a lack of technological solutions to anticipate the appearance of infectious pathogens.

Among the different sectors that suffer from this problem, aquaculture is the vertical whose market is estimated to have the greatest growth potential (within the food industry), regardless its little technological development.

Current solutions in the market cannot detect pathogens on-site in a continuously and autonomous manner, without giving farmers the chance to prevent undesired bacterial growth, lowering down reaction times.

As a result of this lack of capacity to anticipate pathogen infections, aquaculture companies face the following problems: 1.Unwanted fish mortality, due to late diagnosis of infections. 2.The need to use antibiotics, decreasing the quality of the product produced and increasing the environmental impact. 3.Increased production costs due to low productivity and increased technical costs associated with sanitary controls and treatments. 4.Sustainability problems caused by the generation of food waste, loss of animal welfare and the use of chemical products that are harmful to the environment.

All these problemas resut in economic cost of 6 B$/year and losses of between 20% and 30% of production .In response to these problems, KOA was founded, with the aim to develop an integral device that autonomously monitors pathogen concentrations in fish tanks and keep track of its evolution over time, leading to relevant economic and production savings.