Fabricated revenue topples eFishery, Indonesia's $1.4B aquaculture unicorn

eFishery's bet was that Indonesia's aquaculture — the world's second-largest, still run by hand-fed smallholders — could be digitized. Because feed is 70–90% of a fish farmer's cost, founder Gibran Huzaifah started with an IoT feeder that senses appetite and dispenses feed automatically, then layered on marketplaces for feed and fish, financing, and farm data. The wedge was tangible: farmers feel the device in their costs.

The funding machine then took over. A $90M Series C in January 2022 from Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Sequoia was followed by a $200M Series D in July 2023 led by 42XFund at a $1.4B valuation — the first unicorn in global aquaculture. eFishery claimed 70,000 farmers in 280 Indonesian cities and launched in India, with goals of a million ponds by 2025.

The numbers were largely fiction. After a whistleblower raised concerns, a December 2024 board investigation found management had inflated revenue by almost $600 million in the first nine months of 2024: $752M reported against $157M actually earned. FTI Consulting, brought in to run the company, documented two sets of books and fake transactions; co-founders Gibran Huzaifah and Chrisna Aditya were dismissed.

The collapse was fast: 90% of staff laid off by February 2025, India operations shut, investors facing near-total loss on $314M of equity. In August 2025 Indonesian police detained Gibran and two former executives, alleging fraud and embezzlement of at least Rp15 billion. The feeder unit — the one division with a real product — was pitched to private-equity buyers as the salvageable remnant.