Blending ancient wisdom with cutting-edge tech, Seremoni is transforming the fishing industry by scaling ike jime—a centuries-old Japanese method of humanely dispatching fish—using AI-powered robotics. Learn how technology is helping create a more ethical, efficient, and sustainable approach to fishing that preserves quality while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at sea.

Saif Khawaja
Founder and Chairman, Seremoni; Founder and CEO, Shinkei Systems

When Robotics Meets Ritual: Reinventing Ike Jime

Conferences

OK, so sometimes innovation means looking back as much as it means looking forward. So in this next demonstration we're going to re-explore a centuries-old Japanese fishing ritual called Ikejime, which humanely kills fish utilizing AI-powered robotics. So with a focus on preservation of flavor and texture, the Poseidon robot provides a more ethical, efficient, and sustainable approach to fishing. To share more about how they're utilizing AI powered imaging and real-time data, please welcome Sai Khawaja, founder and chairman of Ceremony and founder and CEO of Sheina Systems. Hello everybody, my name is Faith and I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Shia Systems. Uh, thank you for coming to my talk on when robotics meets ritual. At Shinke, we build robots that produce Michelin grade fish at commodity costs. Today you'll get a chance to try our fish, starting the black cod here in a few moments shortly it'll be handed out. And later today at lunch you'll be able to try a rockfish as well. This sounds like a lot, but the story of Shenke really starts with my story. I like to say that I was born in a seafaring family. I grew up in the Middle East in many fishing ports across many different countries. I grew up fishing with my dad, you know, and I actually have matching sailor tattoos with my granddad. You'll see over here the little anchor poking to the side. I moved to the US when I was 18 by myself, went to college, went to grad school, and one of my early mornings there, there was this essay in the newspaper called If Fish Could Scream written by vegan activist Peter Singer. The essay was really talking about the experience of how most fish are handled today, and it's a really big problem. Now when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish that you buy are brought onto the deck of a boat and left to suffocate. It's unfortunate because during that time they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that rapidly deteriorate the meat quality and the shelf life of the product. Over here you'll see on my right side a example filet of one of the fish you'd find at said mass marketer retailer. You'll see blood diffusion in the meat, gaping and most prominently a very fishy smell. So in contrast to that, in Japan there's been a many centuries old technique called EKGMA, and in doing EKGMA, which we'll talk about what that is in a second, it has significantly improved fundamentals on the product, significantly longer shell flies, flavor, and of course the fish are handled humanely. EKG may is a process of rather than letting the fish flop around, you spike the fish in the brain right away, and euthanize it, and you cut the gills to remove the blood. By doing so, you stop the production of stress hormones, you stop the production of lactic acid. The meat becomes less acidic, and in turn the meat lasts up to 3 times as long, taste mission star quality, and of course it's handled humanely. So my idea was To automate EKGA to produce quality as scales that are previously unimaginable. So this is over here my very first prototype in the dorm room way back when when I was still studying. Since then, we've brought an amazing team from everywhere from SpaceX and Andre to A1, Oichi and Oaing, you know, industries industry giants across the entire board. This is my better half, my co-founder Reed. He was leading teams at SpaceX for about 5 years and led the avionics electronics team, Starship avionics, and so the funny thing that he likes to say is that designing and weatherproofing rockets is not too dissimilar from doing the exact same thing in the maritime environment on fishing boats. So this is one of the machines. This is actually a block 2 machine on a boat that I used to work on over here. For the fishermen, they don't get to see much. It's really a black box with a hole in the front and we actually give them machines for free. So that's a great segue into talking about how the technology works and so we're actually going to give a Fortune exclusive right now and move over to a video, which is the first time that the machine has been shown off in public. So this over here is an older version of the robot in our Block I design. This is one of our partners in California. They catch black cod. They do about 20,000 pounds a week, so very stereotypical middle sized family owned and operated business. Over here, the fish are put in one by one heads first again hands free for the fishermen, and they come out with an incision in the gills and a spike in the brain. We can do each fish in about 6 seconds. We're able to get surgical accuracy to be able to hit a 3 millimeter point in a maritime environment at those speeds. So the way that the model works today is rather than us selling the technology, we actually give the technology to fishermen for free. We take the risk and we actually pay them a premium to use the technology. The the fishermen basically take no risk at all, and we sell the fish under our brand name. We call all our fish ceremony great. So ceremony grade is a new philosophy and standard for the very best fish. It's very similar to an analog for grass-fed beef or passe chicken. We want ceremony grade to be the new standard for the fish you're buying at your grocery store. That means mission quality fish for everybody. You can take home Mission the Great Fish home from the grocer. We've been able to enable a new scale for a technique that was previously only accessible at Michelin 3 star restaurants flown in from Tokyo, auction asset or what have you, using robotics and software and mechanism design. We may have to take this artisanal technique, EKGe, implement it with our amazing technical team to be able to produce something that is hands-free, risk free for fishermen, and is in turn democratizing access to set artisanal food. So the ceremony grade, it means many different things to different people. To fishermen it means handling fish with sustainable gear, humanely harvesting their fish the second it comes out of the water all the way to the fish being landed. Through our supply chain we have best in class traceability across location, shelf life, harvest time all the way through to temperature monitoring in the boxes. So we're active across many different regions today. Uh, unfortunately, the, the map a little hard to see here, but we're in 5 regions across the US from Alaska to Pacific Northwest to California, Texas, and New England across all of them. We've more than doubled multiple fishermen's take home margins and been able to take these traditionally not sought after products like black cod or rockfish or black sea bass and be able to create a new class of skew. Uh, more than, uh, just taking our word for it, we actually have real data behind what we're doing. This over here is a graph of rigor mortis, which is a good proxy for the speed of decomposition, and you'll see that a traditional standard harvest fish would enter rigor mortis within about 7 hours of being pulled out of the water. And with our process, the fish are entering rigor mortis in more than 8 times later at 58 hours. So very significant time difference, and that is just in terms of the start of decomposition. When you actually make it down to the retail level or the chef level, we're able to get anywhere from twice to thrice the shelf life in practice for the fish, which, considering how much waste there is in the industry, can really make a difference for all the stakeholders involved. So multiple, multiple chefs have been able to touch the product at this point. We've had everywhere from, you know, best in class restaurants like Blue Hill all the way to high-end Japanese Oakases that were previously flying in their fish use it. We have about 40 Michelin stars across the entire distribution network of ceremony grade seafood, and over the next few months we'll be moving into more traditional mass market retail, all the household names that you would expect. Uh, I hope you'll join me, join me in this movement and treating each fish as it should be and treating each fish as a gift. Thank you very much and please enjoy the fish. Thank you.