Connecting the Dots: Using Light to Detect, Monitor and Control Aquaculture Environments
Nili Persits pitches to the audience at Demo Day’s on March 6th, 2025. Photo credit to Jonathan Clancy at Blue Wave Imagery.
Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) have the potential to become competitive with traditional net pens, pond systems, and raceways. However, they are currently inhibited by filtration, waste, and disease issues that lead to mass fish mortalities and limit profitability, even in tank systems with larger capacities.
Nili Persits, founder and CEO of Dottir Labs, is working with light to solve problems in industries including aquaculture, water treatment, and food and beverage. When her water monitoring technology using Raman spectroscopy is applied to RAS tanks, the optical sensors provide counts of nitrates, ammonia, biomass, metabolic markers, dissolved CO2, pollutants, and diseases. This helps farm operators make informed decisions and continuously monitors the health of their tanks. The solution is scalable, takes real-time continuous measurements, is chemical free, is non-destructive, self-calibrates, and can be automated. Traditional, bulky water monitoring systems will have their work cut out for them with the portable model Dottir Labs is building.
We were lucky enough to sit down with Nili Persists to discuss the origin of the technology and her plans after graduating from SeaAhead’s BlueSwell Program on March 6th, 2025.
Nili Persits talks to an attendee at Demo Day’s reception on March 6th, 2025. Photo credit to Jonathan Clancy at Blue Wave Imagery.
What is the problem that you are addressing at Dottir Labs?
Persits: Dottir Labs is addressing the inability of current solutions to monitor and control large-scale processes. Typical water quality sensors are designed for lab use and very small-scale implementation. They're very expensive and all the benefits that have been proven in the lab are hard to deploy in the real world.
What's the story behind Dottir Labs? How did you create this startup?
Persits: Okay, that's a long one. I worked in the defense industry for about 10 years and have always developed optical sensors. Optical sensors are my life! I cannot begin to describe how exciting they are, and I know that's extremely nerdy, but the ability to discover things from light that we cannot see – but are encoded into light – is magical to me. I've dedicated my career to using light for detection. After working in defense, I decided that sector was not for me. I wanted to use technology for environmental impact and decided to go to graduate school.
I started with pharmaceutical and medical applications and veered into environmental monitoring, which are all things that I'm passionate about. It's hard work getting a PhD and starting a company, but worthwhile because you get up in the morning and there's something good you're trying to do. At that point, my research at MIT was going very well. MIT patented a lot of the technology, and it became obvious that there might be a way to make something big out of it beyond a published paper in a journal.
And so here I am. I started a company after I graduated last year with my PhD.
Wonderful. Just before joining the BlueSwell Program, you started exploring aquaculture and RAS (Recirculating Aquaculture Systems) as a potential beachhead market. We were curious what was behind that decision and your thought process?
Persits: It's a combination of RAS being an interesting problem and a good fit for the technology. The research did start with pharmaceutical production, which I think is still a valid case, but that market is saturated, meaning there's a lot of companies that are already selling sensors that achieve a similar goal.
It was a classic case of a technology looking for a home. I went into aquaculture with an open mindset, even if it didn't feel like I would ever go in that direction. The more I started to explore aquaculture and how much food it provides for the world, how hard it is to do, how farmers are struggling, and how lab practices aren't always as environmentally beneficial as we'd like them to be, the more appealing it became. The more I dug into it, the more I realized Dottir Labs could make a difference. We can monitor these systems to improve them and push them to the next level for the actual benefit of everyone: the farms, animals, and end consumers of these products. This is a win. I applied to BlueSwell after realizing that this is an interesting market, but it's very hard to get into if you're not from that domain. I obviously have never formally studied aquaculture. I'm an electrical engineer born and raised at this point, and I needed industry expertise.
Speaking about BlueSwell, how has being a part of the fifth cohort helped you along your journey so far?
Persits: It's been a very good experience. I went into the program already having the benefit of business programs that were provided at MIT and my Fellowship. I already had a lot of background in business: starting a company, what needs to happen, governance, administration, and due process. BlueSwell has really helped with talking to farmers and making those introductions, as it is a tightly knit community that requires trust. BlueSwell has helped me do things from the bottom up. It's very easy to do a market analysis, but if you can't talk to the people who are really at the bottom of it, then you haven't done anything. Thank you, Ed Cesare. The last point is tactical advice. For example, what's the difference between a good idea and a well-researched, articulated, great idea? And the pitch deck that goes along with it?
Shout out to Ed (one of SeaAhead’s Entrepreneurs-in-Residence) – We’ll tell him that. Next, we were wondering about challenges you've navigated. It could be from the beginning of your journey or from recent memory.
Persits: Oh my god. Is there anything that isn't a challenge? Nothing is easy, right? Starting a company is hard. Tech is hard, doing blue economy and sensors is hard. It’s a huge challenge with both technology and business components that get divided into sub-challenges.
What's framing all of this is that it's very hard to make the transition between having a good technology (and a cool idea) and having a technology that can be sold, bought, and is reliable. I was naive and didn’t realize that there's a huge gap between having a technology and having a product, and those things need to be distinguished. I think BlueSwell and other accelerators help with making that leap. But down the line, until you make that change in your own head, it doesn't matter what people tell you. At some point, you have to change the way you think about it from “what am I building?” to “who am I building it for, and what do they need the technology to accomplish?”
Makes sense. The technology backing from MIT and their interest in your sensors gave you the confidence you needed to realize there's something more, beyond enjoying what you love.
Persits: Certainly, there's a lot of benefits to doing a PhD and one of them is that you learn to trust yourself and your thought process while picking up a lot of things and learning them quickly – and do all that while you're running. It's a huge support system. There's no way around it: MIT is a big name and has a lot of resources, and I'm very privileged and honored to matriculate from MIT. It taught me a lot.
Persits stands beside her fellow cohort members during the Q&A session at BlueSwell’s “Ocean Startups in the Ocean State” event in Providence, Rhode Island on November 13, 2024. Photo credit to Jonathan Clancy at Blue Wave Imagery.
And we’re curious about your focus area for the next few years. The underpinning of this question is around your raise and what you’re building out with that money. What do you hope to accomplish with additional funding?
Persits: A consequence of moving out of MIT into another space was that I couldn't take the equipment that I used for my PhD research. A huge effort that Dottir Labs is undergoing is raising money to build a new demo system. And of course, I'm talking about a new and improved version because I know exactly how to improve the design now. I've learned a lot in the process. Most importantly, we want to build a demo system to show potential customers and investors that we can physically take with us. Not a heavy behemoth from the lab, but something agile. The exact type of system we intend to build, deploy, and sell so that we can show it in the real world where it belongs, outside of the lab.
So, would you be able to walk up to a RAS tank, and anybody could drop in or install the sensors?
Persits: We say, “can I put some sensors in your water?” And within a few hours we can tell you how much nitrate and ammonium is present in the water, including specific contaminants and disease markers that are suboptimal. Yes, the full diagnosis is like: “here's everything wrong with your system and here's how I can fix it.”
That's so great. And you said it's really fast, too. The sensors can constantly be processing, correct?
Persits: Yes. You get better response time, and you can do it continuously. You would be able to click a button and say, oh, “I'd like to know what it reads now,” or have it updated regularly and be able to do something with that information. We don't want to keep the information lying in a library somewhere. Ideally, someone is taking action based on it or automating work so that they don't have to constantly worry if there's enough oxygen, if the fish are feeding properly, and instead feel secure that everything is running smoothly.
What are some recent wins you can share with us?
Persits: I've obviously just graduated from the BlueSwell Program! Another really big thing that happened is that our lab space is secured. It's an independent lab within Greentown Labs in Somerville. We also have a new employee who's amazing and we're lucky to have him, and that's been a huge boost to what we can do and how much we can accomplish. On top of that, we have some contractors, and our advisory board was established, which is phenomenal. We're doing all of this while raising money. Things are looking up, not that it's not hard and challenging, and there are some good signs.
Persits tests her sensor technology in the Charles River that divides Boston and Cambridge, MA.
Awesome. We love to hear that. Thank you for sharing, too. Our final question is what advice would you give your past self before you embarked on the founder journey?
Persits: Oh, goodness. This is a hard one because as an entrepreneur and founder you keep questioning past decisions like, “could I have done it better?” This is true for me, at least. I don't know if everyone struggles with this, but I'm assuming I'm not the only one. It's hard to get rid of that habit, even though it's not very useful. Sometimes it's good to learn from mistakes, but if you're constantly questioning what you did, even though you did your best, then it's hard.
The first piece of advice I would give myself is don't be so hard on yourself, and the second is to think longer about the end customer. It took me a long time to understand what that means. When you talk to founders of businesses and companies, traditionally it’s easier when you start with a problem instead of the solution. And of course, starting with a technology like me, you are bound to this technology and you're looking for a problem that fits it. So, it's reversed, and it's worth taking the time to talk to as many customers as possible from the beginning.
Thank you for those answers. We love hearing that you're doing what you love and sharing the technology with people to help to solve their pressing issues.
Nili Persits poses at her MIT lab for MIT Technology Review’s Alumni News feature on April 23, 2023. Photo credit to Ken Richardson and Rebecca Rodriguez at MIT Technology Review.
To get in touch with Nili Persits, contact her at nili@dottirlabs.com
To learn more about Dottir Labs, visit https://www.dottirlabs.com/
ABOUT BLUESWELL:
BlueSwell takes a whole-ocean approach to fighting climate change and advancing the blue economy. The program focuses on bridging gaps between innovators, ocean experts, industries, and the venture community. BlueSwell leverages SeaAhead’s bluetech domain expertise, network, and experience in building companies to ultimately convert ocean-focused concepts into profitable, sustainable businesses.
To learn more about BlueSwell, click here.