Rasmal Venture’s Aqua Development Maps the $72 Billion Blind Spot in Global Seafood — and the Gulf’s Chance to Close It

Insights from Aqua Developments shows that the world’s favourite seafood is farmed in the wrong places, and the Gulf could soon grow its own.

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, October 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Aqua Development, the South Korean aquaculture-technology company backed by Rasmal Ventures, Qatar’s first institutionally backed investment firm, published the inaugural issue of the Shrimp Report — a field report on the global shrimp economy that lays out, with independently sourced data, why a USD 72 billion industry remains one of the most fragile supply chains in global food, and why the Gulf is positioned to help fix it.

The report frames those fault lines — disease, chemistry, carbon and a near-total absence of standards — as the opening for a different model: enclosed, biosecure farms built close to the markets that eat the shrimp. For Rasmal Ventures, that thesis is why it backed Aqua Development in the first place. “Food security is one of the defining investment themes of our region, and shrimp is a textbook case of a huge market that has never been built properly,” said Soumaya Ben Beya Dridje, Partner at Rasmal Ventures. “What drew us to Aqua Development is that it is not selling a story — it is putting a technology in the ground and letting the harvests speak. That fits exactly how we invest: we validate real market access before we commit capital, and in the Gulf the demand for clean, locally grown protein is already there.”

That demand is most visible in the Gulf, where the report’s case lands hardest. The UAE imports roughly 70% of the seafood it eats and produces only about 1.6% of its shrimp domestically, while Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 food-security programme targets 80,000 tonnes of farmed shrimp a year by 2030 — up from under 30,000 tonnes across all species in 2020. Aqua Development is already building toward that gap: in Abu Dhabi, it is running a pilot facility in KEZAD’s aquaculture zone in partnership with ADQ, co-funded through ADQ’s Growth Lab, and on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast it has designed and helped build a 1,000-tonne farm at Mastorah — its first outside Korea — financed largely through the Saudi Agricultural Development Fund as part of the Kingdom’s food-security drive.

Aqua Development’s system is built to make enclosed farming pay where it never has before. On the company’s own, independently unaudited measurements, its modular, recirculating design produces on the order of 100 tonnes per hectare a year — against three to twenty tonnes for conventional ponds — with no antibiotics or therapeutic chemicals, and is protected by two core inventions granted as four patents across Korea and the United States and running to 2041. “You can engineer a better tank, but the real test is keeping a million animals alive every day, cleanly, and at a price people will pay,” said Doohyun Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Aqua Development.

About Aqua Development

Aqua Development is an aquaculture-technology company founded in 2019, with roots in shrimp-farming R&D dating to 2017, and headquartered in Busan, Republic of Korea. It develops an enclosed, modular shrimp-farming platform, a patented recirculating-tank and oxygenation system joined to biological protocols and a data layer, built around a modular design that lets a farm be assembled from standard 200-tonne units and expanded in stages and designed to grow shrimp affordably inside the markets that consume it, without antibiotics or mangrove loss. A commercial farm has operated in Korea since 2020. Further sites are underway in Saudi Arabia, where the first phase of the Mastorah farm on the Red Sea coast is sized at 1,000 ton a year, and in Abu Dhabi, where a 50-ton pilot facility is being built with ADQ in KEZAD.

About Rasmal Ventures

Rasmal Ventures is Qatar’s first institutionally backed investment firm, trusted by sovereign wealth funds including the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). Investing across MENA, Türkiye and Asia, Rasmal connects Gulf capital and market access with high-growth founders, validating Gulf market access before committing capital. Its partners have previously delivered a 5x fund return and backed some of the region’s most significant technology exits, including Careem and Snoonu.

TAREK AHMED
Narrative One