South Australian startup GoMicro secures deal with 100 Sri Lankan supermarkets for tech democratising tuna grading

Created in Adelaide, South Australia, the GoMicro artificial intelligence microscope has previously been used in a kit to diagnose leishmaniasis in war-torn nations, on farms to identify pests, and in schools as a teaching tool.

It is now being tested to grade tuna for consumption in Sri Lanka.

The GoMicro technology combines a mobile phone microscope attachment with an AI suite that is able to recognised patterns and objects with a fraction of the number of photos usually required.

GoMicro founder and CEO Sivam Krish said that their AI microscopy tool had impressed an investor in Sri Lanka because it had the ability to grade seafood, such as tuna, with a database of hundreds of photos, instead of tens of thousands.

“We now have an investment from a star investor Jeevan Gnanam in Sri Lanka, so we formed a fully owned subsidiary there to do our software development,” Krish said.

Gnanam introduced GoMicro to John Keells Holdings PLC, the largest conglomerate in Sri Lanka, and the owner of supermarket chains.

“Their supermarket chain has an extraordinary commitment to deliver fresh food. They procure directly from farmers through five collection centres and put it in shops with 24 hours,” Krish said.

“We actually talked to them to help them assess vegetable quality, but tuna assessment was a bigger challenge.

“While it is easy to differentiate really good tuna from really bad tuna, it is difficult to differentiate good tuna from not-too-good tuna.

“It’s a 12-year apprenticeship to train a tuna expert, so this is a problem in the edge of human assessment.”

The GoMicro app in action.

GoMicro solves this problem by allowing warehouse staff to simply use their phones to take a photo of the tuna, before the AI-supported app then quickly determines a grade so they can label it and send it to the appropriate store.

The GoMicro technology is able to develop this grading database quickly because the Adelaide-based company, which was spun out of the New Venture Institute at Flinders University, has solved the problem of bad lighting that often hinders photo databases by optically engineering the lens and building a diffuser into the tech.

“It is not all about magnification, it is about the quality of the images,” Krish said.

GoMicro uses advanced manufacturing technologies to manufacture the microscopes and the Tensorflow AI engine developed by Google to make predictions.

The technology is being tested at Colombo supermarkets before a planned roll out to the chain’s 100 stores in Sri Lanka.

Krish said the AI system could easily be adapted to other seafood as well as fruit and vegetables and their business plan was to sell subscriptions to the system.

“We offer 10,000 clicks a month for US$100, and the device comes free with the subscription,” Krish said.

This article was first published by The Lead.

NOW READ: How airport tech startup Elenium Automation snagged a new group of customers in the face of COVID-19, and raised $30 million to boot

NOW READ: The Wine Collective bags $8.3 million, as COVID-19 drives demand for boozy e-commerce