Commercial Fishing & Aquaculture Operations Software
The buyer population — Fishing, hunting and trapping
Base industry report for 114 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 4,944
- Under 10 employeesA
- 96%
- Establishments · USA
- 3,071
- Employment · USA
- 7,243
- Payroll · USA
- $533M
Of 4,944 Canadian establishments with employees, 96% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators. Each of those is one potential account, before any filter for size or fit.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — capital intensity
The value in a fish farm sits in cages, feed barges, sensors and boats — the software is a readout on capital equipment sold by the same vendors, and it is priced accordingly. Wild capture is worse: electronic monitoring is a regulatory obligation whose buyer is a fleet owner already resisting the cost. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Sectors joined: Ocean Tech
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
The incumbent
Who owns this market and who is coming for it. Fields a screen never reached say so rather than guessing.
The field
Every vendor named on this record, and what each one discloses. Most disclose nothing, which is why the market is not sized.
Competitor set · 3 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| AKVA groupC | not disclosed | — | Listed in Oslo and discloses group revenue, but the Fishtalk software line is not broken out |
| Innovasea (Canadian — Halifax)C | not disclosed | — | Private |
| Manolin / Aquabyte / DeckhandC | not disclosed | — | Private, venture-funded |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. UNVERIFIED — screened on analyst judgment. Incumbent names and positions are from general market knowledge and were NOT independently researched for this record; no financials are attached because none were sourced. Verify before acting.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National association of Canadian seafood farmers; member directory, species and regional coverage.
Site says it represents 60+ businesses raising farmed salmon in BC - the largest concentration of farm-management software buyers in Canada.
National association for the wild-capture fish and seafood industry; the fleet-owner side of this record.
Founded 1969; site says membership has grown to more than 3,000 members in about 100 countries. Runs the Aquaculture America and Aquaculture Canada meetings.
West Coast commercial fishing and marine trade show where vessel electronics and monitoring systems are sold; next edition 19-21 November 2026.
Aquaculture trade publication covering farm technology and software; articles dated 22 September 2026 when checked.
The buyers here are fish farm and fleet operators, not software people, so these are their industry bodies and trade press. thenaa.net (National Aquaculture Association) and aquacultureassociation.ca returned nothing, and Aquaculture North America refuses connections from this network.
The businesses it sells to
Operating-business records filed along the same branch of NAICS — the customers of this software, screened as businesses in their own right.
On the BC coast the licence and quota cost more than the fishing earns, which is the whole screen: quota has been capitalised into an asset held largely by non-fishing owners, and the active harvester leases it at a share of the landed value that leaves the boat with the risk and a thin margin. Entering means either buying an asset priced as a security or renting one from someone who already owns it. The sector's software is screened separately at the same code.
The record at Commercial Fishing Licence & Quota screened the Pacific model, where quota became a leased financial asset. This group is mostly the other coast: 68% of the 4,828 establishments are in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and 85% have one to four employees — a boat, a captain and a crew. The fishery itself is excellent. Canadian sea fisheries landed C$3.608B in 2023, of which lobster alone was C$1.76B [A]. The cut is that the Atlantic inshore has been closed to exactly the kind of entrant this research serves. The owner-operator and fleet-separation policies are no longer policy but regulation: an inshore licence can be issued only to an individual, a company that individual wholly owns, or an organisation holding an allocation for its membership, and it will not be issued to anyone who has transferred its use or control [A]. An investor cannot own the licence, a processor cannot own the boat, and a side agreement that tries is grounds for losing it. What remains is buying out a retiring harvester personally — and brokers on Prince Edward Island reported licence, boat and gear packages reaching C$1.8M [B], a price that already capitalises the lobster boom into the seller's pension. The offshore, where companies may hold licences, trades in blocks like the C$1B Clearwater sale [A]. The software sold to this fleet is screened separately.
The pre-screen said licence-bound and tiny; the numbers say tiny is the operative word. Entry is cheap — a trapper's course, a licence, a registered line or a landowner's permission, a snowmobile and steel. What is missing is revenue. The Fur Institute of Canada's compilation of provincial wildlife-agency returns puts all wild fur sold in Canada in 2023–24 at 330,710 pelts worth C$12.76M, down from 916,572 pelts and C$48.96M in 2012–13 [B]. That is the whole country's crop, shared among every licensed trapper, and it would not make one mid-sized business. The Northwest Territories, which markets its fur actively, reported 7,421 pelts sold for C$582,043 across the entire 2025 season — and pays trappers a start-up grubstake of up to C$2,000 to keep them on the land [A]. Price is set at a single auction in North Bay by a handful of international buyers; in June 2025 muskrat averaged C$1.99 and beaver C$15.18. Trapping persists as culture, wildlife management and side income, not as an enterprise, which is why 75% of the 116 establishments have one to four employees and none has fifty. The money adjacent to this code — guided hunts for non-residents — is classified with hunting and fishing camps at 721212 and was not screened here. Game preserves were not separately researched.