Aquawise will showcase its AI-driven water quality technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Water quality is the most important thing an aquaculture farmer must monitor to ensure their livestock stay healthy. While there are existing methods for monitoring water quality – such as sensors and water testing equipment – ​​they are too expensive for many farmers in regions such as Southeast Asia.

Aquaways It wants to offer aquaculture farmers in Southeast Asia a better way to monitor their water quality using existing artificial intelligence and satellites – without having to purchase hardware.

Bangkok-based Aquawise takes satellite images of fish and shrimp farms and feeds them into a physics-based AI model that monitors the water for things like temperature, chlorophyll level and oxygen levels.

The Aquawise platform can continuously monitor water quality; Traditional methods are monitored daily or weekly. Aquawise also offers tracking and forecasts.

“Water quality is one of the most important things in aquaculture,” Pattipond Thiabonganit, co-founder and CEO of Aquawise, told TechCrunch. “It’s like being a human: you have to breathe. Aquatic life lives in the water all the time. If the water quality doesn’t stay at an optimal level, it can cause stress, it can cause disease outbreaks, a lot of things.”

Aquawise will be showcasing its technology as part of this year’s exhibition The emerging battlefield Competition in TechCrunch disabled 2025which runs from October 27 to 29 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Nineteen-year-old Tiabonganit said the idea for the company started with a love of shrimp which led to a research project on shrimp larvae.

While submitting his project to the 2023 Young Scientists Competition, he met his co-founders, Chanati Jantrachotichawan and Kupchai Duangratanalert, who were advising a competing team. Jantrachotechatchawan and Duangrattanalert were impressed by the tiabonganit and ended up advising the tiabunganit project, which won the 2024 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair.

The trio then had to figure out what to do next.

“We have to step back and try to find the most important problem in this industry,” Tiabunganit said. “We found it to be a water quality problem that 80% of aquaculture farms face today. It costs approximately $30 billion in losses every year.”

This became the basis for Aquawise, which was founded in 2024.

Water quality is not a big issue for aquaculture farms in regions like the United States and Europe, but it is a much bigger problem in developing regions like Southeast Asia, Duangratanalert told TechCrunch. Farmers in this region cannot afford monitoring technology, relying instead on weather reports and manual water checks, despite the potential consequences of poor water quality.

Duangratanalert said the first idea for Aquaways was to use sonar to monitor water quality. Their original idea was to use acoustic sonar to capture data from the water, and even tested it on an aquarium at Tiapunganit’s home, before they realized that would still be too big a financial hurdle for the farmers.

“We want people, especially in Thailand and in the entire Southeast Asia region, to feel that they can use it to improve their livelihoods in terms of the community, the region and the farm itself,” Duangratanalert said.

Aquawise works with several farms and uses the data it collects to further train its AI model. The company wants to make sure its model is accurate before it starts selling to farms.

The startup also plans to raise money from investors in the new year as well.

“Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector worldwide today,” Tiabunganit said. “It was the only industry predicted by the United Nations as the best way to help feed 10 billion people in the coming years because of its ability to provide high nutrition with very low amount of emissions.”

If you want to learn from Aquawise first-hand, experience dozens of additional presentations, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Head here to learn more about this year’s DisruptOctober 27-29 in San Francisco.