Bhubaneswar-based aquaculture-tech startup targets threefold growth, deeper farmer reach across three states over the next 18 months
Bhubaneswar-headquartered aquaculture firm Aquapulse is preparing for a sharp scale-up in its operations, with plans to nearly triple revenue over the next 12 to 18 months as it widens its farmer network, lifts procurement volumes and pushes into new shrimp-producing regions of India. The company, which runs an integrated farm-to-market model connecting small shrimp producers with domestic and export buyers, is targeting revenue of Rs 400 crore against last year’s Rs 130 crore, according to co-founder and chief executive officer Abhishek Dwivedy.
Central to this growth plan is a geographical push into Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest shrimp-producing states, where Aquapulse has already onboarded close to 1,000 farmers and begun deploying its field teams. The company says it will soon set up local advisory centres in the state to accelerate farmer enrolment, building on an established base in Odisha and West Bengal. Alongside this expansion, Aquapulse plans to grow its farmer network from more than 7,000 to 10,000 and raise shrimp procurement from 2,000 tonnes to 5,000 tonnes, with the value of shrimp procured expected to rise between 2.5 and three times over the previous year.
The Andhra Pradesh entry is not an isolated move. Aquapulse was founded in 2022 by brothers Abhishek and Abhilash Dwivedy, and has already been widening its footprint across eastern and southern India over the past year, drawing in institutional capital to support that expansion. The company had raised Rs 25 crore led by Nab Ventures with participation from Pontaq through its NextGen Technology Fund-I in April 2026, before closing a larger Rs 45 crore round led by NABVENTURES’ AgriSURE Fund, with IAN Alpha Fund contributing roughly Rs 20 crore to that round. Sarika Saxena, managing partner at IAN Alpha Fund, said the firm was drawn to Aquapulse’s grasp of the aquaculture ecosystem and its ground-level execution, noting that the fund backs scalable, execution-driven companies bridging critical market gaps. The capital raised is earmarked for strengthening farm-level technology, improving disease management systems, expanding the farmer procurement network in eastern India, scaling processing and export operations, and supporting working capital needs.
Aquapulse’s strategy rests on treating geographical diversity as an operational advantage rather than simply a growth lever. Because shrimp crop cycles vary across regions, the company intends to run a year-round procurement calendar, drawing volumes from different clusters at different points in the season instead of depending on a single harvesting window. This, Dwivedy explained, is meant to smooth out the uncertainty that has historically made shrimp farming a risky proposition for smallholders. “Shrimp farming is a high-risk business for a small farmer because several things can change between stocking a pond and taking the crop to market. Our aim is to give farmers better visibility through that cycle and, importantly, a reliable route to the market when the crop is ready,” he said, adding that as the network grows from 7,000 to 10,000 farmers, the priority will be ensuring that scale actually improves farmer economics rather than diluting them.
That farmer-first positioning runs through the company’s technology stack as well. Aquapulse provides farmers with services spanning water quality monitoring, feed management, disease early-warning systems, harvesting coordination and market access, and has built an integrated platform combining pre-harvest support, harvesting, processing and export logistics to improve traceability across the value chain. On the ground, the company records farm information, water quality parameters and crop history through the production cycle, using this data to track crop progress and streamline procurement decisions. Its AI-led advisory system works alongside conventional field support to give farmers greater clarity on the factors likely to affect their eventual returns, and the company says farmers on its platform see a 3-5 per cent improvement in realisation as a result. “Better information has value only when it improves the farmer’s outcome. The technology is helping to identify problems, help a farmer protect a crop, give him greater certainty about the buyer and ensure that a well-managed crop receives better realisation. Our next phase is about taking this model to more farming clusters while retaining that connection with individual farmers,” said Abhilash Dwivedy, co-founder and chief growth officer.
On the demand side, Aquapulse facilitates exports to China, Vietnam and Japan while also supplying domestic institutional and modern trade buyers, positioning it within a seafood export economy that crossed $8.28 billion in 2025, with shrimp accounting for a significant share of the country’s export earnings. That backdrop — a large but fragmented farming base still underserved by formal market systems — is effectively the gap Aquapulse is trying to close by building a more organised, traceable, farmer-linked supply chain running from pond to buyer.
The company’s model has also drawn international recognition this year. Aquapulse was named one of three global finalists in the aquaculture category of the 2026 Responsible Seafood Innovation Awards, held by the Global Seafood Alliance, and presented its farm data, traceability and farmer-linkage model at the Responsible Seafood Summit in Bangkok earlier this month — a validation that arrives just as the company begins the harder work of proving its model can scale threefold across a third state without losing the farmer-level trust it has built in Odisha and West Bengal.