Healthy fisheries sustain coastal communities.

The system that governs them runs on spreadsheets and institutional memory.

Eight Regional Fishery Management Councils, NOAA Fisheries, and 50 state agencies collectively manage hundreds of fish stocks affecting billions of dollars in coastal economic activity, and the human well-being of the communities those fisheries support.

The data exists. The infrastructure doesn't.

Council decisions, stock assessments, public comments, NEPA documents, and management actions are scattered across agency portals, static management-body websites, internal spreadsheets, and decades of institutional memory.

• There is no unified system for tracking how fisheries decisions are made, who participated, what science was cited, what alternatives were considered, what the public said.
• This opacity disproportionately affects under-resourced communities: small commercial operators, recreational anglers in fishing-dependent communities, Tribal nations, and conservation NGOs without budgets for full-time policy staff.
• Without a transparency layer, public-comment campaigns repeat themselves, precedent gets re-litigated, and equity gaps in who gets heard widen.

The open intelligence layer that makes fisheries governance legible, navigable, and equitable.

Fisheries Intelligence Platform (FIP)

The federated parent layer. Ingests, structures, and connects the public record of U.S. fisheries management, every council, every amendment, every stock assessment, every public comment, and (via crowdsourced pipelines) every fishing report posted to social media.

Six practitioner-facing products

• Stakeholder Engagement Engine, full-lifecycle structured interview management: outreach, scheduling, consent, recording, AI transcription & analysis, sector coverage scoring, aggregate cross-interview synthesis.
• FMP Intelligence Tracker, every council action from scoping through implementation, with regulations.gov / Federal Register comment ingestion, SEDAR linkage, workplan tracking, and natural-language query across the full regulatory history.
• Tournament & Harvest Monitor, mobile catch reporting for state agencies and tournament organizers, with photo-AI species ID, real-time leaderboards, and structured harvest data that calibrates MRIP.
• NEPA Efficiency Toolkit, boilerplate library, document-reuse intelligence, AI-drafted Environmental Assessment sections grounded in historical precedent for Magnuson-Stevens actions.
• Vessel Intelligence & Compliance Monitor, AIS / VMS / permit / environmental data fused into a fleet-behavior prediction and enforcement-alert engine for NOAA OLE, Coast Guard, and state marine patrol.
• Cross-Council Knowledge Exchange Forum, structured asynchronous knowledge sharing across all eight Regional Fishery Management Councils, so each one stops independently reinventing what the others have already solved.

Two cross-cutting layers turn the products into a platform.

Each product is sellable on its own. The cross-cutting layers are what make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts.

• Federated Intelligence Layer, the network-effect engine. Aggregates de-identified metadata across product deployments to produce cross-council dashboards, predictive analytics, and federal-level transparency views. As more councils deploy individual products, the intelligence layer becomes exponentially more valuable.
• Social Media & Crowdsourced Intelligence Pipeline, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and iNaturalist ingestion with NLP species/location/effort extraction. Feeds harvest calibration (Tournament Monitor), enforcement intel (Vessel Intel), sentiment landscape (Engagement Engine), and earliest-signal trend detection across the FIP.

One record, every council it touches.

Most fisheries decisions don't live inside a single council. The right whale rule, the Magnuson reauthorization, the menhaden compact, each spans three, four, eight bodies at once. The FIP indexes them that way from day one.

Worked example: the NARW vessel-strike rulemaking

5,080 public comments arrived on a single day, on a single docket, every one a near-verbatim variant of one shared template. The rule itself crosses NEFMC, MAFMC, SAFMC, and HMS jurisdiction simultaneously. In any single-council tracker, those comments would land in one bucket and be invisible to the other three. FIP federates them: every comment is queryable from every council it affects.

This is not a deck dream. It's running today.

• 30+ years of council deliberations indexed and searchable, verbatim hearing transcripts broken into 3 million+ semantically-chunked passages with action and species cross-links.
• FIP is the federated index for the U.S. fisheries stack, designed to ingest every council, every FMP, every amendment, every SEDAR assessment, and every public-comment corpus. See the live coverage matrix →
• SAFMC FMP Tracker is the first public-tier demo deployment of the FIP, 11 ongoing SAFMC actions live, with real public comments, AI-summarized themes, and council-meeting linkage. Visit safmc-fmp-tracker.onrender.com to see it.

What no one else is doing

Beyond ingestion, the FIP runs network-detection on the public record, surfacing patterns that a human reading regulations.gov one comment at a time would never see.

Zero workflow change for the people we serve

Council staff, NOAA scientists, SEDAR coordinators, and Advisory Panel / Scientific & Statistical Committee members do not have to learn a new tool, change how they file documents, or send us anything. The FIP picks up their public work product where they already publish it, 30+ scheduled jobs ingest from regulations.gov, the Federal Register, SEDAR, council briefing books, NOAA FishWatch, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, USAspending.gov, the NOAA Climate Data Online API, and 16 other sources on weekly, biweekly, and quarterly cycles, then parse, link, and publish back as a single navigable intelligence layer.

Stats above pull live from the FIP public-stats API when reachable; otherwise placeholders shown.

Fisheries practitioners who built the technology themselves.

This is not a tech team learning fisheries. This is a fisheries team that built the technology.

A sustainable mission-aligned business, not a venture moonshot, not a grant-dependent NGO.

Pricing is the pressure that keeps the product useful. Foundations fund the public tier and the equity gaps; earned revenue funds the rest.

Durable revenue ceiling: $1.5–3M ARR as a sustainable mission-aligned business, not the $50M+ ARR a venture investor would underwrite.

From philanthropic capital to healthier fisheries, measured at every step.

We do not promise stock recovery. We promise process improvement that enables stock recovery, and we measure the process improvement.

Right now, the best-resourced voice wins. That isn't how the process is supposed to work.

Federal fisheries law promises every American a seat at the table, the small-boat captain in Sneads Ferry, the charter operator in Destin, the Tribal nation, the family processor. In practice, the players who can afford full-time lobbyists and lawyers see the record clearly. Everyone else is reading it through a keyhole.

The gap is access to information, not the right to participate

• The well-funded already have this. Large industry associations and national NGOs run staff whose entire job is tracking dockets, decoding amendments, and timing comments. Pélagos doesn't take that away, it gives the same vantage point to the people who can't hire it.
• Same record, same tools, no gatekeeper. The free public tier puts the full regulatory history, plain-language summaries, and natural-language search in the hands of independent fishermen, Tribal resource managers, journalists, and rural coastal communities, at no cost.
• This is a both-sides value. A working waterman keeping more of his catch, a community defending its livelihood, and a citizen who wants government to be legible all want the same thing here: a process that's open, honest, and not rigged toward whoever has the deepest pockets.

Equity here means equality of access to the public record, not redistribution of fishing rights. The fish, the quotas, and the law don't change; who can see and engage the process does.

NOAA is asking Congress for funding to build exactly this.

From NOAA's FY 2027 Operations, Research, and Facilities budget request, Program Increase Exhibit 13.

What this signals to funders

• Federal demand is on the record. NOAA itself is putting AI-for-permitting in front of Congressional appropriators, a public commitment that this is the direction the agency is going.
• Pélagos is positioned to be the partner, not the competitor. NOAA's request asks for Federal agency partners and IT professionals to scope the work. We are already inside the entire fisheries-management ecosystem with running infrastructure.
• Aquaculture permitting is a beachhead. The same NEPA / programmatic-permit machinery applies to FMP amendments, EFH consultations, and ESA Section 7, the entire fisheries regulatory stack.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Operations, Research, and Facilities, FY 2027 Program Increase request, Exhibit 13.

We are not cold-calling. The team has already won grants from these funders.

Across the four co-founders' prior work, this team has secured $13M+ in named, documented awards from organizations whose portfolios align directly with Pélagos' mission. Receipts, not rapport.

Documented prior awards (Aaron, lead or co-lead)

Aligned funder portfolios for the Pélagos round

• Builders Initiative, already a major SOAR funder; direct continuity into Pélagos' aquaculture / public-tier thesis.
• Schmidt Sciences / Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, ocean tech with public-good thesis; demonstrated interest in AI-for-conservation infrastructure.
• Walton Family Foundation, Oceans Initiative, sustainable fisheries; coastal community resilience; demonstrated funding of governance-improvement work.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies, Vibrant Oceans Initiative, fisheries data, transparency, government capacity-building.
• Pisces Foundation · Resources Legacy Fund, fisheries policy, environmental governance, community-level engagement.
• NOAA Sea Grant / National Sea Grant program, academic and government partnerships; the science-synthesis layer aligns directly.
• Closer-in / family-office partners, for SAFE-shaped philanthropic capital that combines mission alignment with light-touch financial return.

Purcie Bennett-Nickerson (BNEC), Stephen Poland (Cynoscion), and Jake Spencer bring additional grant and contract receipts from prior environmental-law, fisheries-management, and engineering work; full founder-by-founder breakdown available on request.

Y1 harden the platform. Y2 scale public access. Y3 durable hybrid revenue + national footprint.

Two tranches: a $146K bridge for Months 1–6, plus $854K for the 18-month build-out, $1M total.

Tranche 1: Bridge ($146K, Months 1–6)

Covers immediate team time, formation, and the data-source / architecture work that's already running. The bridge lets us close the main round from a position of strength, not exhaustion.

Tranche 2: Main close ($854K, 18-month runway)

Itemized spend totals $509K across Months 7–18 (Team comp $377K · Legal/IP $28K · Infra $27K · Travel/BD/marketing $32K · Contingency $45K). The remaining $345K is runway buffer to carry through Month 24, weather one slipped quarter, and hire a second engineer when the first paid council partnership signs.

Bridge dollars roll into the main close on the same SAFE/PRI terms, no separate paperwork, no separate cap. We'll come back for Series Seed at $1.5M+ at Month 18, with paid council revenue in hand.

$1M total

$146K bridge + $854K main close. Pre-seed, hybrid structure: SAFE-shaped capital and/or program-related investments / grants.

• $146K bridge covers Months 1–6: team time, formation, IP, and interim platform ops while we close the main round. Bridge dollars roll into the main close on the same SAFE/PRI terms.
• $854K main close on a YC post-money SAFE at $8–10M cap for traditional investors, or PRI/grant structure on equivalent economics for foundation funders.
• Co-investment welcome, actively seeking a lead and 2–3 mission-aligned co-investors.

What this funding buys

18 months of platform operations · public-tier expansion · first two council partnerships executed · NEPANav in private beta with real council users · Series Seed-readiness ($1.5M+) by Month 18 with real council revenue in hand.

The honest version.

Foundations and investors both spot platitudes faster than venture associates do.

Three things have to be true at once. They are.

Built with federal procurement, security, and data-handling constraints in mind from day one.

The FIP is designed for the compliance envelope agency partners actually operate in.

Compliance roadmap

Honest stance: we are a four-person team at pre-seed. We have not paid for a SOC 2 audit yet. We have made architecture choices today that keep every gate below within reach as the funding arrives and the customer demands materialise. Specific dates will be set against a real customer commitment, not back-fit to a deck.

Data-handling architecture

• Public tier, only data already in the public domain (regulations.gov, Federal Register, council briefing books, SEDAR public assessments, FOSS landings, FishWatch). No restriction; no isolation needed.
• Council pre-decisional tier, encrypted at rest, single-tenant per council, role-gated access, full audit trail. Never crosses into the public tier or the federated intelligence layer except as voluntarily released by the council.
• CFR Title 50-confidential VMS data, the Vessel Intelligence product is on the roadmap and is gated on a NOAA data-use agreement before any vessel-level fusion goes live. Aggregated, anonymized fleet patterns only flow upstream from confidential sources.
• Stakeholder PII, Engagement Engine collects names, contacts, and recorded interview content under explicit per-interview consent; PII is stripped before any cross-deployment aggregation reaches the federated layer.

A full architecture diagram, control matrix, and data-flow specification is available under NDA for partnership conversations.

The category has been validated, but not for fisheries.

Federal labs are productizing AI for environmental review. None are doing it for fisheries.

In 2025, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) launched PermitAI™, a Department of Energy-backed platform applying large language models to NEPA environmental reviews for energy infrastructure. Its tool suite (SearchNEPA, ChatNEPA, CommentNEPA, WriteNEPA, EngageNEPA) targets exactly the workflow the FIP targets.

PermitAI validates the category. Fisheries is a defensible vertical they are not coming for. We track their open evaluation frameworks (MAPLE v2, DraftNEPABench, BSD-licensed) and plan to adapt them into a fisheries-specific benchmark suite.

How material enters the corpus, with provenance.

Every document is license-gated, deduplicated, dual-stored, and traceable: from raw source to a provenance-cited answer in the FIP AI chat.

↓ Technical reference (PDF): component names, storage model, and provenance columns