OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Every Thursday, Founder of the Week talks to a player in the MENA region’s sustainable startup scene, and asks them about their business and how they got their break. Speaking to us this week is Sean Dennis (LinkedIn), CEO and co-founder of Seafood Souq.

My name is Sean Dennis (LinkedIn) and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Seafood Souq (SFS), a UAE-based digital ecosystem company focused on traceable, sustainable seafood trade.

Prior to founding Seafood Souq, I co-founded New York-based blockchain infrastructure company Loyyal. Loyyal was a startup centered around managing customer rewards, incentives, and loyalty.

Sustainability is a personal passion of mine. My Emirati co-founder, Fahim Al Qasimi (LinkedIn), and I decided to launch SFS to enable fishery players to get their products to the global market in a sustainable way through a digital, global marketplace.

I believe that traceability is the precursor to sustainability, especially in the seafood industry. At Seafood Souq, we facilitate trades all over the world. We have complete oversight of the supply chain and are able to trace produce all the way from source to the buyer. If you were to go into supermarkets in Europe and the US, you would see our SFS Trace QR code and logo on some retail packaging.

SFS Trace enables customers to trace the origin of the seafood products they’re buying in near real time. This makes it very difficult for a bad actor to operate. It provides channels for the good actors and suppliers to show off the extra metrics, regulatory requirements or certifications that they've got.

One in five items traded in the global seafood industry will be either mislabelled or misdated. In developing countries, wastage in the blue economy supply chain can be as much as 40-45%, compared to 20-25% in Western countries.

Another interesting fact? One in three items doesn't make it to your plate. Not only do we overfish our oceans, but we’re wasting an exorbitant amount of marine life.

It's very difficult for governments and private enterprises to track overfishing levels: There is little data on this. By digitizing the seafood industry and trade, we're able to gather information, both on the demand and supply side of the equation. Because we have the intel, we provide a feedback loop: We know where the hotspots for demand are coming, and can open up new markets to source from, as well as new markets for selling depending on the seasonality of different fish, to try and avoid overfishing.

We were very fortunate that our SFS Trace system was selected by the United Nations as a case study for part of their Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030).

We work on the sourcing side with fisheries and agriculture farms. We launched a project in Oman that would enable them to sell to international markets and get better prices for their products. Locals we worked with were getting USD 0.75/kg for their fish. They were catching grade A fish, but by the time they brought it to land the quality wasn’t as good due to ineffective storage techniques. Now, because we've gone in and helped them out, they're able to get USD 12 or 13/kg, instead of ＜USD 1.

On the sales side, we're selling to distributors, processors, wholesalers, and large-scale FMCG retailers. We’re selling in lots of different regions — not just MENA but also Europe, the US, and we’ve just now started in the Asia-Pacific region.

Linking developed markets with developing markets can be problematic: A buyer in France might create a letter of credit (L/C) to fishermen who live in a rural village in Africa, for instance. Fishermen don’t care that they’re going to get a L/C that will get them paid in three months’ time. They need the funds now to pay for fuel to take their boats out to sea.

We’re launching a product called SFS Pay, which will effectively include finance vehicles to enable supply chain finance for the trade between buyers and suppliers.

We’re creating SFS Pay as a product to enable those funds to go directly to fishermen. We're working with a number of different groups, on both the commercial bank and investment levels, to facilitate better funding for those who need it. We have piloted SFS Pay and run it effectively. We’re now building it out as a separate product to be offered through our platform within the next one or two fiscal quarters.

We completed our series A funding round earlier this year, and we are currently focused on preparing for our series B round, during which we intend to raise a significant amount to fund our global expansion. 85% of SFS’ trades are global, and only 10-15% of our trading is inbound into the GCC.

We’ve had a mix of investors throughout the various funding rounds, both regional and international. The regional investors that led our series A funding round included: Global Ventures, while our international investors included Universum Global out of the UK and South Africa, among others. We will be focused on partnering with global investors for our series B round to help with our expansion plans.

We’ve been operating with gross profit since day one, and net profitability is currently within arm's reach. We can hit net profitability if we choose to, but our aim now is to grow with a global focus.

Moving forward: Our medium term goals include opening up an office in Holland for European operations. We will also open up an office in the US, and are looking at Singapore as a potential location for another SFS office to cover more of the Asia-Pacific market. Our long term goals are to have complete global coverage, and have a massive impact on the blue economy and the seafood industry.

Whenever I have free time on my hand, I decamp from the office and do anything that is ocean- based. I love free-diving, surfing, and sailing.