Wiring Indonesia's shrimp ponds with sensors, software, and a supply chain that finally talks to itself.
JALA, Yogyakarta - an aquatech company born where electrical engineers from Gadjah Mada University sat across the table from a shrimp farmer who'd worked the ponds since 2001. The result is one app, one sensor, and 20,000 farmers who now know their water before the water knows them.
Shrimp farming is a business of thin margins and sudden losses. Dissolved oxygen can crash at three in the morning and take an entire pond with it. Feed a cycle wrong and the returns evaporate. For decades, the answer was experience and instinct. JALA - founded in 2017 in the Special Region of Yogyakarta - decided a lot of that risk was really a data problem, and built the tools to make the invisible visible.
At its core, JALA is a full-stack aquaculture technology company. It makes a portable water-quality device that reads dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, salinity, and total dissolved solids, then feeds those readings into the JALA App, where they become something more useful than a number: a recommendation. The company's stated philosophy is deliberately unglamorous - as CEO Liris Maduningtyas puts it, to "provide simple farm management recommendations and not overburden farmers with complicated graphs."
That restraint is the product. Where many "IoT companies" hand a farmer a dashboard, JALA tries to hand them a decision: run the aerator tonight, or don't. And because coastal ponds don't always have reliable internet, the early devices could still send alerts by SMS - technology designed for the conditions farmers actually face, not the ones a pitch deck imagines.
JALA's customers are Indonesian shrimp farmers - the smallholder with a handful of ponds and the enterprise running hundreds. More than 20,000 users rely on the JALA App, which has monitored over 35,300 ponds and more than 15,700 tons of shrimp, assisting in the harvest of over 9,900 tons.
The company grew out of Yogyakarta, Central Java, West Java, and Lampung, with expansion aimed at Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Nusa Tenggara - the remote coasts where farmers have historically had the least access to technology and capital.
JALA doesn't sell software alone. It folds monitoring, financing, inputs, and market access into a single loop so a farmer's whole business runs in one place.
Flagship farm-management app for cultivation monitoring, data logging, and analytics - built to give simple, actionable guidance.
Portable multiparameter sensor reading DO, temperature, pH, salinity, and TDS, with RFID tagging so one device covers many ponds.
Access to capital that helps farmers fund cultivation cycles and grow without stalling on cash flow.
High-quality feed, inputs, and equipment delivered to ponds, including remote farming regions.
Harvest access and trade channels connecting farmers directly to buyers and markets.
Market intelligence tracking shrimp pricing trends and industry news for better timing.
This funding will enable us to bring our end-to-end shrimp farming solution to remote areas in Indonesia.
JALA is a B2B ecosystem. Revenue comes from hardware and software subscriptions - reportedly around US$24 per pond per month - layered with financing, supplies, and marketplace fees. Rather than charging for software alone, it earns across the shrimp value chain it helps organize.
The stated mission is blunt about the endgame: consolidate the supply chain to lower the landed cost of fresh shrimp while ensuring quality, transparency, and sustainability.
Competitors like eFishery, XpertSea, Aquaconnect, and Umitron circle the same market. JALA's edge is a founding team that pairs electrical engineers with a chairman who has farmed shrimp since 2001 - domain knowledge built into the hardware, not bolted on.
As Hatch's Carsten Krome noted, "the technology is easy to use and provides direct savings to farmers." Simplicity, offline resilience, and a bundled ecosystem are the differentiators - not the flashiest analytics.
| Round | Amount | Date | Key investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | US$13.1M | Nov 2023 | Intudo Ventures, SMDV, Mirova, Meloy Fund |
| Seed / Early | ~US$6M | 2021 | Mirova, Meloy Fund, Hatch |
Reported total funding ~US$19M. Figures per public reporting and third-party databases; treat as approximate.
Liris Maduningtyas and Aryo Wiryawan launch JALA to bring data to shrimp farming.
The flagship farm-management app rolls out for cultivation monitoring and analytics.
A portable multiparameter sensor brings real-time water monitoring to ponds.
JALA raises reported ~US$6M and adds financing, inputs, and marketplace services.
Intudo Ventures leads a Series A to expand into remote farming regions.
Through a Climate Smart Shrimp initiative with Conservation International, JALA pairs pond intensification with mangrove restoration - a bet that yield and coastal ecology don't have to be at odds. Other backers and partners include Intudo Ventures, Sinar Mas Digital Ventures, and the aquaculture accelerator Hatch.
JALA is an aquaculture technology company that helps shrimp farmers monitor water quality, manage farms, access financing and inputs, and sell their harvests through an integrated app and IoT devices.
JALA was founded in 2017 in Yogyakarta by CEO Liris Maduningtyas and chairman Aryo Wiryawan, a shrimp farmer since 2001.
JALA raised a US$13.1 million Series A in November 2023 led by Intudo Ventures, following earlier funding - reported total funding is around US$19 million.
More than 20,000 users rely on the JALA App, which has monitored over 35,300 ponds and 15,700+ tons of shrimp.
A portable sensor measures dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, salinity, and total dissolved solids, sending real-time data - or SMS alerts when offline - to the JALA App, which turns readings into simple recommendations.
JALA's YouTube channel - app walkthroughs and farmer stories.
Company news, funding updates, and shrimp-industry insights.