Meet Paul L. Grech, CEO & Co-Founder of OctaPulse, "TSA for your luggage, but for fish!" - one of the VentureBridge 2025 Cohort Companies

June 27th, 2025 - Steven Guo

Carnegie Mellon University’s VentureBridge program, an initiative of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, supports CMU-alumni founded companies with capital, co-working space, access to mentorship and resources, and investor demo days across San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and New York City.

In this spotlight series, we take a behind the scenes look at an interview with Paul L. Grech, Co-Founder & CEO of OctaPulse at the beginning of the VentureBridge program in May. The interview below is slightly edited for clarity.

Q: Let’s get rolling. You’re the Co-Founder & CEO of OctaPulse, and your one-liner is, “we’re building the future of autonomous aquaculture, starting with AI-powered computer vision to automate deformity inspection in juvenile fish.” What does that mean? Tell us more.

Paul Grech: So a simplified version is that we are helping fish farmers double their profitability by saving money on fish food, and we are doing that by building computer vision models that filter out unhealthy fish before they make it to the main feeding stage, where 70% of cost is going. And we like to say, you can think about it like “TSA for your luggage, but for fish.”

Q: Great tagline. Okay, now let's hear more about you. Who are you? Who is Paul L. Grech?

Paul Grech: Yeah, I just finished up my MBA at CMU this past May and I can't believe again how fast these two years flew by. Before coming to CMU, I was working at Bloomberg LP in New York City for six years, doing mostly product sales, but I also had roles in analytics and project management. But for me, the biggest impact about working at Bloomberg was getting to volunteer and witness Bloomberg Philanthropies, and everything that they were doing related to the ocean, which always was my top interest, because my parents are from two islands - Malta and Puerto Rico. So growing up, I was always in the water, and the ocean has always been like a second home to me.

During COVID, I kind of had this aha moment where I knew I wanted to make a change, to work in the ocean conservation tech space, and build something that had opportunity to make a major impact on preserving the ocean, but also had a commercial viability lens, because I've seen other non-profits that don't have the financial scale that Bloomberg Philanthropies does.  Which is that they're doing great work but they are at the whim of whatever fundraising cycle comes through, and then a lot of them end up having to shut down. So when I first came to CMU, my goal was to really get as involved as possible with the entrepreneurship and robotics resources here, and then go down the path of getting ingrained in the ocean community and finding the ways in which a commercially viable business that incorporates robotics could make a major impact in ocean tech.

Q: It sounds like the ocean is a very big part of your life. Tell us how someone who doesn't have the same relationship to the ocean as you do, why is it so meaningful to you?

Paul Grech: Well, I think for somebody that might not have the same passion or the same experiences that I have, one major point that I would always point people to is that the oceans are the lungs of the earth. A lot of people think that the rainforest is such a huge carbon sink, but in reality, the ocean 10x's that. And the ocean controls so much of what goes on from a weather standpoint, from an ecological standpoint, and we've been mistreating the ocean for decades. And unfortunately, current projections say that we're going to start to see more drastic effects of all of that maltreatment of the ocean by 2050.

That’s where OctaPulse comes in. Our specific solution is focused on mitigating overfishing which has pushed global wild fish stocks to the brink of collapse, and by 2050, entire ecosystems are expected to suffer. Once that happens, all of the ramifications to other areas are going to start to be shown. Therefore, a lot of people are seeing further impacts of global warming, they're seeing the melting of the ice caps, and we're seeing coastal cities starting to see the effects of it, but pretty soon, that's going to head more inland, and the effects are going to be even more drastic. So everybody should have a motivation to protect the ocean, because if you want future generations to not have crazy weather effects, or even a more simple reason – just being able to enjoy the ocean – a lot of change needs to happen now.

Q: Going back into a bit of your connection to the ocean, what's a core memory you would like to share about your love of the ocean?

Paul Grech: *chuckles* Yeah, I have so many! One of them is the moment that I really learned how to swim – I was using swimmies, obviously – but I was in Malta in the Mediterranean, where my dad is from, and I was so impatient and didn't want to wait for the boat to make it to the dock. Yeah, I was complaining and complaining, so my dad just picked me up and dropped me into the water, and while I was using swimmies to get to the dock, pretty soon, I didn't even need them anymore, and I just kind of ripped them off. I was only four or five years old when that happened, and that's when I really fell in love with the ocean, because until then, I couldn't really dive down due to the swimmies, and the water is so clear there, so you see all the sea life, and I could just spend hours and hours under the water.

Q: Let’s talk about your team. You said that your team’s superpower is the “ability to combine technical excellence with grit, adaptability, and a deep passion for ocean innovation. Each founder brings an outlier strength that fuels our advantage from expertise in aquaculture, AI, computer vision, robotics and sales.” Tell me more about that and who they are. Who is the team that makes up OctaPulse?

Paul Grech: My co-founders are Rohan Singh and Andres Castrillon, and we came together because in a landlocked city like Pittsburgh, it's really hard to find people that are deeply passionate about ocean efforts. And we were really fortunate that it was actually through one of the CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship events back in September of 2024 that Rohan was talking to some people about his dream of building underwater robotics. And by that time I had already established myself at CMU as being the oceantech person. So Ruben Quesada – also in this VentureBridge cohort – connected us because he heard Rohan and said, “oh, you got to go talk to Paul.” And from that day, we exchanged information and then we met every single week for a few hours at least, talking about ocean efforts, sharing all the research that I had done on aquaculture, because people don't really understand how big of an opportunity it is. It's a $310 billion global market.

So that's how Rohan and I met, and then Rohan and Andres met because they're both GEM fellows, and then through the mechanical engineering side, as Andres has an underwater robotics background. He's originally from Colombia and grew up in Boca, Florida, so he has a deep connection to the ocean as well. Additionally, Rohan is from Goa, India originally, right by the way, which is why he has a passion for ocean efforts as well. And with all of that, Rohan had a gut feeling that we would all mesh together.

So as things started to develop, we all met, and then after I came back from Hawaii having gone to visit an aqua farm, learning more about this actual problem that we're working to solve right now, all three of us decided to go all-in on solving this. And to the point about that superpower you mentioned, Rohan is building everything on the software side, Andres is doing everything on the hardware side. And then I have done the work to ingrain myself in the industry, start establishing a presence, and really understand the intricacies of the aquaculture business.

Q: Amazing to see all of your connections to the ocean in different parts of the world, and then you all kind of found your way together here in Pittsburgh, with our humble rivers! Touching on what you said about ingraining yourself into the industry and learning about the business… What is something that you saw that no one else seemed to notice?

Paul Grech: When I was out visiting this one farm and getting to tour the hatchery, it was crazy to see how many things are happening within the hatchery. And then for this specific practice that we're looking to solve, the deformity inspection process – everything is manual. They have so many other things that they're focusing on, tech wise, that this process just hasn't had the attention and the love yet of bringing on new tech, even though, ten years ago, people tried to bring in computer vision solutions. It just was too expensive and at too big of a scale.

Now, the main insight that I saw was the fact that the reporting aspect is very tough. A lot of times, what they're doing with deformed fish is just putting them into a beaker and 400,000 fish per batch that's coming through. You can imagine how inaccurate the recording is of that, plus how much could be lost from cohort to cohort when six of these inspections are happening in a year for an average sized farm. So that is a big point that our solution is looking to address is giving more actionable insights so that these farmers can make better decisions to prevent deformities and improve overall yield and profitability. 

Q: And what is the timeline like? I know we were talking a little bit about the the pilot you're doing with the University of Miami, and how there’s a very short window of time to get involved… is a key challenge you're helping to tackle just reducing all of that manual work and the time it takes to even inspect all these fish, which they probably don't have too much time to really go through in all of those batches, right?

Paul Grech: Yeah, they have to! They do get through everything. It's just… we were able to learn through conversations with these farms that the accuracy rate of technicians drops to below 70% and that's fairly industry standard. Once fatigue sets in, it can actually occur midway through day two of a seven to ten day inspection process. So they definitely need solutions that help to reduce the overall time. But then a lot of these farms, they also want to make sure that the accuracy stays as high as possible. So our solution is already being proven to detect with over 90% accuracy. And then for our commercial rollout, our version one, we're targeting to reduce the time it takes to conduct this process by half. And then the great thing is, the technicians have so many other things that they could be doing that really requires that human-in-the-loop. So therefore, we're also improving the revenue produced per technician by implementing our solution.

Q: What's the North Star of OctaPulse?

Paul Grech: Our dream is to build an autonomous aquafarm from the larval stage all the way to post-process harvest. Right now, our focus is on this deformity inspection process because there's such a big need, and it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. And it's also a great way to get us ingrained in the industry, develop that trust with the farmers. That way we can apply our solutions to the full production cycle in the future. And one of our goals is tank to tank transfer, so that way the fish don't even need to be taken out of the water and are impacted as minimally as possible. That way even more healthy fish are making it to harvest end-to-end. And then, our other vision is to bring our technology into the offshore pen, where there are a lot of problems, because you're at the mercy of the open ocean.

Q: How do you hope OctaPulse changes the world? How would this transform the way we operate, the way we think about things, the way we kind of live?

Paul Grech: Yeah, right now aquaculture has, or as of 2018, has actually surpassed commercial fishing in production of seafood, and it needs to increase even further because of those effects that I mentioned earlier. With overfishing, there's international regulation, but a lot of countries just aren't following the regulations. And with all of the effects that come from overfishing, we're going to start to see them more and more over the next decade, two decades on. Additionally, when you just think about overfishing as a whole, aquaculture needs to scale to mitigate that. But then there's also the problem of rising population and lower availability of farmland.

Year after year, more and more farmland is turning to commercial or residential property, and the fact that our population rate globally has not stopped, the demand for food has only increased. And the other piece about aquaculture, when it's done sustainably, is that it has the potential to be the most economical and nutritious form of protein, and that model has already been proven in tilapia farms in parts of Africa, whereas it has surpassed all other forms of protein and has made a really big impact in ending hunger and some of those countries. So that, I think, is the biggest impact of technology coming into advanced aquaculture is making sure that it's done in a more sustainable way, that we are making sure that we're meeting that demand for seafood or food in general, and it's minimizing the impact on the ocean as much as possible.

Q: Congratulations again on graduating this year from Tepper with your MBA. Could you quickly highlight the different ways that you were able to tap into the CMU entrepreneurial ecosystem to support your journey, from when you initially came here and through now with OctaPulse? 

Paul Grech: The Swartz Center has been instrumental to me, and it has that big umbrella of all of the entrepreneurship resources. But I'll touch on each of the pieces, starting with meeting Dave Mawhinney through my involvement with 99 Tartans. He right away was so willing to hear about this very infant of an idea two years ago, and directly connected me with alumni and people across the network that could help as I developed the idea further. Then in the fall, the entrepreneurship boot camp event on campus was a big piece, just to really understand more of what programming and resources are offered through the Swartz Center and across CMU in general.

Then I joined project Olympus and participated in the Customer Discovery Kickstarter program, which was so valuable because while I had a sales background from Bloomberg, it was such a  different experience when you're selling something that's so well known, and all of the credibility comes with the name Bloomberg versus when you’re starting from scratch and it was just me at the time. And the original idea I had when I was talking to commercial fishermen or talking to charter boats or just people in the industry, it was very difficult, so the Kickstarter was a great way to start to understand what needed to be done from a customer discovery standpoint, and really taught me the importance of pivoting.

Fast-forward to Spring, I had taken the Lean Entrepreneurship class with Meredith Meyer Grelli and that really was an amazing next step, because for the first time, I took this idea and put it to the test pretty much, forming a team and then pitching it to volunteer judges that had investment backgrounds. Just being able to go through that practice really took my customer discovery process to the next level and form the business idea was super helpful for me. And then through that class, I learned about the Robotics Institute Pathways Fellowship, because the director, Corey Turner, came to class and presented that program to us. That opportunity really helped, from a personal standpoint, help me feel more confident about the idea and about developing the company, and I think it made a major impact in helping me to get accepted into things like the Hatch Blue Accelerator Venture Builder program.

Going into the fall, I had Dave Mawhinney’s two courses, marketing for entrepreneurship, and the commercialization innovation workshop, those were both really great, because Dave gave a lot of free reign to just focus on the idea and provided a lot of guidance to help bring me back down to earth and kind of form what needed to be done to get the company to the next level. Between that and my mentor through the pathways fellowship, Matt Johnson Robertson, the director of the Robotics Institute, that semester, my progress went from 0 to 60, and it was insane how much was accomplished in that short period of time.

And then in this spring, being able to have the OctaPulse be part of the AI Venture Studio course taught by Adam Paulisick and Sean Ammirati was a huge, huge support as well, having a whole 12 credits to just really dedicate to the idea. In addition to the Capstone, it was super helpful to us. Plus all of the support that they gave with their time from the kickoff weekend all the way up until Demo Day, and I know beyond, to make themselves available, give as much feedback as possible, making introductions, doing pitch feedback, taking calls on the weekend to help with some questions. So we really owe a lot to Adam and Sean, in addition to Dave for our growth.

And then the other major piece, I would say, is getting to participate or compete in the McGinnis Venture Competition, specifically the social enterprise track. I remember when I first came to CMU and I got to see some of the companies in the competition, I was thought, “I really want to compete in that, but I doubted myself, and I said, 'it would be great just to be able to make it to the final’, Now to be able to let alone win the Social Enterprise prize, was simply incredible, and then that helped us to get to the Hult Prize nationals, which is a whole nother experience. I don't think I've ever presented in a room of 150-200 people before, so that was a really informative experience as well.

One other experience that ties directly into my journey as a founder was my involvement with 99 Tartans, an independent angel syndicate of CMU alumni investing in CMU founded startups. I initially got involved because Chris Elston was the past president of the GEC and the lead for 99 Tartans. I had been actually talking with Chris when I was still in the interview process for Tepper. And then when I got accepted, I let him know directly, and because he knew of my passion of becoming a founder, pulled me into 99 Tartans, where it was a really worthwhile and surprising experience. The fact that I had direct access – as a freshly minted MBA student – to see founders pitch their companies to investors, get to understand what goes through the minds of investors when they're assessing companies, and then developing that relationship with founders that were going through the fundraising process itself… I think that was really instrumental, because I was able to see how other founders presented, and take away lessons that I try to incorporate on my journey when I'm now going through fundraising. Additionally, keeping in mind what are the major red flags that investors are looking out for when companies are coming in, either in the traditional kind of software play, or even some of the deep tech ones that came through that experience was really worthwhile to my foundation as a founder.

Q: What other experiences were central to your personal growth and founder journey?

A key experience on top of all of the entrepreneurial resources and support at CMU was my internship with Miami Dade innovation authority that was really instrumental for me. I had a lot of opportunities directly working with the CEO, and every time that I had expressed interest in learning and working on a certain area, I picked it up right away. They're also a nonprofit organization, a kind of impact investor that partners with the county of Miami-Dade to host innovation challenges, where they bring in startups that are aimed at solving some problem for a challenge host partner, which is a major economic engine in Miami-Dade County. So they had the first one that was focused on sargassum algae. That's how I got involved with them and if anybody's been to the southeast or in the Caribbean, you've seen sargassum and the effects that it has. And then the second challenge was with the Miami Airport, and the third with the Port of Miami, working on cargo visibility. Overall, a really, really great experience, and I learned a lot, for which I’m so grateful for.

Q: How can the community help you? What's your call to action?

Paul Grech: Our goal is to raise $500k this summer, to expand on the $63k that we earned through getting into two accelerators, CMU VentureBridge, and then VentureWell Ocean Enterprise Accelerator, which was non dilutive funding, on top of the SAFE note that we got from winning the CMU McGinnis Social Enterprise prize, the 500k will go towards deploying and validating our pilots. We have two coming up in Miami, one in Massachusetts, one in Idaho, one potentially in Arizona, one in the Mediterranean, and then another one in Hawaii, and as well as some potential opportunities we may be working with in Latin America. So the travel cost to bring our hardware out and deploy them is what a lot of that $500k will go towards. It will also ensure that the three of us are full time on octopus. That $500k will set us up for targeting a seed round at the end of the year. Right now we're looking at $5.3 million, and that $5.3m will allow us to build the first iteration of our commercial platform, a fully automated system. And then we're going to be hiring another computer vision engineer and then an underwater robotics hardware engineer that has an optics background.

Q: Last one. What is an important message that you have to share?

Paul Grech: The important message, I would say, is that even though, when somebody thinks ocean conservation, they might have different opinions of what really is the problem with the ocean, the key message is that there are ways to build commercially viable businesses that not only have a revenue potential and a financial growth potential, but are making a real difference in bettering the world and ensuring that future generations have the opportunity to make special memories in the ocean, as many of us have been fortunate to do so.

Thank you to Paul L. Grech for the conversation. We welcome you to follow, invest, and champion OctaPulse as they move forward. Come and see them pitch in-person at our upcoming CMU VentureBridge 2025 Demo Days in Pittsburgh (September 24th) and San Francisco (October 8th)!