The Norwegian startup is part of X Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory
For the past five years, Tidal has worked with aquaculture industry leaders to develop its solution, which tracks fish behaviour and helps farmers gauge when the fish are hungry to increase feeding precision, and reduce the amount of carbon released by uneaten food. This is done through a system of underwater cameras, sensors, machine perception tools and software designed to interpret complex ocean environments. The current platform has been built and validated using Tidal’s AI, which has been trained on 8 billion underwater observations of fish behaviour across 900 terabytes of operational video.
Until now, Tidal’s platform has been available to select pilot partners only, offering data-driven insights designed to improve the sustainability and efficiency of their operations. Cognizant says that it will use its software and systems integration expertise to bring the Tidal platform to the broader aquaculture market.
Longer term, Cognizant and Tidal say that they will explore additional ways to apply the platform to make an impact on industries that depend on ocean insights, including blue transportation; blue energy, and blue carbon. Together with aquaculture, part of blue food, these sectors of the blue economy represent a significant opportunity to decarbonise large ocean-based industries.
“With digital technology ocean industries can not only become more resilient and future-proof in the face of a more unpredictable and rapidly changing environment, but they can help make oceans healthier and address humanity’s biggest problems – from food production to renewable energy to climate change,” said Stig Martin Fiskå, global head of Cognizant Ocean, in a press release. “We welcome this important collaboration with Tidal to work together with clients to support their holistic, systems-level change.”
“To preserve ocean health, we need to take an innovation-driven and collaborative approach with aquaculture companies and other businesses that make their living on and in the ocean,” said Tidal founder and CEO, Neil Davé. “Through our collaboration with Cognizant, we hope to build on our initial success in the Norwegian aquaculture industry, and eventually expand to other sectors of the Blue Economy to make a meaningful impact in ocean health and global decarbonisation.”
