He flew 250+ missions for the Air Force. Then helped launch food delivery in two cities. Then spent four years in Taiwan's startup scene. Now he's teaching commercial fishing fleets to find tuna from 80 kilometers away - without a helicopter.
Somewhere in the South China Sea, a tuna purse-seine vessel is running two drones at once. They're scanning 3 times the ocean that a helicopter could reach, and they cost a fraction of what that helicopter burns in an hour. The captain has no idea how the tech works. He doesn't need to. John Keh's team is on the boat handling everything.
That's Valtec's model: system as a service. Drones, software, ground control station, operators - deployed. No upfront capital. No training burden. No maintenance headache. Just fish.
The idea sounds simple until you realize Keh built it by colliding two completely different careers. Before maritime AI, he was the 3rd employee at Caviar - a San Francisco food delivery startup - launching New York and Los Angeles from scratch before Square bought the company for $100 million. Then he moved to Uber Eats, leading courier business intelligence across the US and Canada. He was very good at moving things through complex, chaotic networks.
Before that: the Air Force. Geospatial intelligence. 250+ missions in South Korea and the Middle East, watching the world from above, learning where objects move, how to read terrain at altitude, and what happens when data arrives a second too late.
"The helicopters are very high maintenance, very cumbersome to take care of, and it takes up a lot of space. Not only are drones cheaper, but with multiple drones, you can now search 3 to 5 times the area, reducing your time to catch, thereby saving a lot more gas from the ship."
- John Keh, Founder & CEO, ValtecThe pandemic sent him to Taiwan. What was supposed to be a temporary stop became four years. He joined SparkLabs Taiwan, one of the region's leading accelerators, evaluating early-stage companies and working inside the ecosystem that would later back his own venture. He also co-founded restaurants - a chain called Chick'n Rice. He wasn't idle.
Valtec launched in January 2023. The founding team brought in aerospace engineers, defense intelligence specialists, and ocean scientists. The product roadmap targeted one of the world's most operational, least-digitized industries: commercial fishing. In 2024, DIGITIMES covered the company's technology deployment on purse-seine tuna vessels in Taiwan and the Philippines. By March 2025, $2 million had closed.
"Decisions at sea can't wait."
- Valtec TaglineHe launched two cities for a food delivery app, ran logistics across North America at Uber, spent four years in Taiwan's VC ecosystem, co-owned restaurants, and then built maritime drone systems - all before Valtec turned two years old.
Valtec's Larus drone can cover 3 to 5 times the ocean area that helicopter-based fish-finding operations could reach, while costing a fraction of the maintenance, fuel, and deck space.
The investors who backed Valtec's $2M pre-seed include the founder of Guitar Hero and the co-founder of Twitch - two names you don't usually see in a maritime intelligence deal.
Keh's favorite quote comes from Yuval Noah Harari: "Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural." Make of that what you will about a guy who taught fishermen to use drones.