BlueTrace

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Founders: Drew Condon, Cat Ganim, Andy Kearney, Chip Terry
Founding: 2017
Mission: Simplify the Seafood Supply Chain
Employees: 10 & ~50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4.3M Raised
Investors: York IE, Maine Venture Fund, CEI Ventures, SeaAhead and strategic angel investors
Key Customers: Denarius Trading, Madhouse Oysters, Nonesuch Oysters, Calm Cove Oyster Company
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Q1 ‘22 $3.2M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

BlueTrace is building software to empower seafood distributors and producers, helping these underserved businesses simplify their operations and comply with increasingly complex regulations while growing their bottom line. If they do that well, the outcome is fresher, better, and safer seafood on consumer’s plates. This Seed stage startup works closely with local shellfish farmers and seafood distributors (of all kinds) to bring them technology solutions & supply chain transparency in order to meet rising regulations and increased consumer demands. They do it all through a mobile, easy to use, automated traceability system.

In 2017, Chip Terry the “Main Founder from Maine”, was funemployed. The startup he worked at, BzzAgent, had been acquired by dunnhumby and he was starting to look for his next thing. Maybe owning an oyster farm would be cool? The aspiring gentleman farmer, he went to visit a few and realized that perhaps playing the part and acting it were two entirely different things. 

In fact, it seemed like oyster farmers had some serious challenges running their day to day operations. Over the next 3 years, a nights and weekends project began to take shape. Chip recruited BzzAgent & dunnhumby colleagues Cat Ganim & Andy Kearney to develop their initial product. Drew Condon, a colleague of Cat’s, soon came onboard to complete the part time founding team. 

BlueTrace’s MVP served oyster farmers (and was at the time called OysterTracker). Their tool helped owners map their farms and identify when various lines & bags of oysters needed to be handled and harvested. It was a cool product, but “not a great business” (their words, not mine!). The ultimate vitamin that everyone said they wanted but, when things got really busy on the farm, it was really tough to keep up. 

The thing about Chip, Cat, Andy & Drew though is that they are deeply experienced startup builders. They dig deep into customer development and know to seek out the true pain of their customers. Through the course of developing their initial tool, they uncovered that federal  regulations mandate every single shellfish bag needs to be physically tagged when harvested. This tag then travels with the bag through the lifespan of these oysters from farm to (basically) table.

Once you tag the bag, you capture the transaction in a log. Imagine being out on the water, where farmers are handwriting records on paper. Tags get smudged, ripped, & lost and the same goes for logs. No one wants to be doing this! So the BlueTrace team started automating this process through an iPhone app attached to an industrial mobile printer. Oyster farmers started using it, paying for it, and BlueTrace started accelerating.

Part of what attracted the team to this space is not just the business opportunity (which there is) but also through going to visit customers and seeing that no one really focused on solving the problems they have. These are hardworking people out on docks, scaling fish, making deliveries, doing really hard work to put food on your plate. BlueTrace started its focus on the actual factory floor and they built an iOS app for the operators receiving the fish, not only for the accountants upstairs. BlueTrace intimately understands how seafood operations physically work versus how a financial resource might want a seafood business to work.

Global seafood happens to be the most traded protein in the world. Each March in Boston, the Seafood Expo for North America comes to town and blows minds with the sheer size & scale of the industry. It’s raw capitalism in action. If you want to see some of the numbers behind the seafood industry, you can here. Spoiler alert, it’s really big. The global seafood market is >$250B and U.S. landings revenue (i.e. all fishing) represents >$5B. It’s an industry that is definitely behind on digitization and deals with tricky, rapidly depreciating assets. Distributors and providers do math in their heads, on the fly, and rely on heuristics. Not to mention the barriers to entry are high and..physically demanding.

The founding team developed an initial foothold serving 12,000 U.S. shellfish producers and, when they began building the business full time, they expanded to serve seafood distributors too. The distributors have the net benefit of being larger with the ability to spend more on technology solutions.

BlueTrace competes most consistently with spreadsheets, paper, and traditional battleship gray ERP software. The startup offers a SaaS usage based model for their software, printers, and paper based on “pay per print”. As they serve more distributors, they will likely evolve into more of a pure play SaaS offering for some customers. Deal sizes are consistently in the four to five figure range growing across their customer base as they unlock a wider segment of the underlying network of producers and distributors.

In 2023 they crossed 400 small and mid sized customers but also remain committed to selling to mom & pop producers to fulfill their mission of empowering seafood businesses of all sizes. Through this full channel approach there is the added benefit of continued exposure to more distributors as they see BlueTrace tags trafficked across the network driving further adoption. Their north star metric – prints – just crossed 3M. That’s a lot of fish! Their customer base includes all but two coastal U.S. states and most Canadian coastal provinces. 

In February of 2023, BlueTrace announced $3.2 million in Seed funding led by York IE, Maine Venture Fund, and CEI Ventures. In 2024 they will be working to bring in larger deals and reboot their GTM motion after an engagement with advisory firm York IE. They recently onboarded two sales resources and will likely invest further in Engineering in 2024. 

Over the coming years they aspire to build a verticalized seafood inventory management platform that serves the whole seafood lifecycle from providers (farmers) to seafood distributors to customers (restaurants). As they build a team focused on sustainability and solving the problems of a legacy industry in new ways, there will be many more products & use cases to come across this growing opportunity.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the BlueTrace team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key milestones BlueTrace is looking to achieve in 2024?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you balance serving seafood distributors and providers?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about BlueTrace you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more seafood operators into the digital age. All seafood connoisseurs applaud your efforts. See you around the New England coastline!

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