On July 12, 2024, Tidal graduated from X, the Alphabet “moonshot factory,” to become an independent company. Tidal had spent about six years inside X developing underwater AI for aquaculture - the farming of fish - with the goal of making one of the world’s fastest-growing food sources more sustainable and efficient.
The core technology is a system of autonomous underwater cameras, sensors, and machine-learning models that continuously watch farmed fish. The software measures fish growth and health, tracks environmental factors such as temperature and oxygen, and interprets fish behavior - for instance, recognizing feeding behavior so that feed can be dispensed only when fish are actually eating, cutting the waste and pollution caused by overfeeding. Building computer-vision models that work in murky, moving water was hard enough that the team trained early versions using realistic rubber fish before moving to live pens.
By the time it spun out, Tidal had deployed 230 systems across Mowi salmon farms in Norway, monitoring the health and feeding of millions of fish each day, and had begun expanding to a global customer base. The independent company, which became known as TidalX, raised outside funding led by Perry Creek Capital to commercialize the platform.
Why business readers should care: feed is the largest cost in fish farming, and overfeeding both wastes money and pollutes water. Tidal shows how a narrowly aimed computer-vision system - just “are the fish eating right now” - can attack the single biggest line item in an industry, which is often where AI pays off fastest.