SAIC Introduces: Nōka AI

Nōka is an AI and biotechnology company building predictive models of fish biology for the aquaculture industry. The company operates across several jurisdictions, including a UK research entity based in London, alongside teams in the US, Canada, Norway and India.

Three founders kept encountering the same problem across different industries — producers only discovering that something had gone wrong after it already had — and recognised the opportunity to build an AI model that could predict it in advance instead.

Nōka's core product, ALKEMYST™, is an AI world model built to predict how a fish will respond to a change in feed, environment, or breeding selection before that change is tested on a farm. Rather than relying on historical statistics alone, ALKEMYST™ is grounded in the underlying biology of the animal: it builds a virtual cell of the target species from genetic and metabolic data, maps the biomarkers and metabolic pathways that drive a given outcome, and then screens thousands of possible interventions computationally, so producers can prioritise which options are worth the time and cost of a physical trial.

The platform is designed to support decisions across the full aquaculture value chain, rather than a single point in production: breeding selection, feed formulation, disease and health monitoring, and the timing of key life-stage transitions such as smoltification. It has been applied to Atlantic salmon, Arctic char, yellowtail, and shrimp, with the same underlying model adapting to each species' biology rather than being rebuilt from scratch for every new one.

"Because ALKEMYST™ reasons from the biology itself rather than just historical patterns, it can generalise to a species or a decision point we haven't modelled before which is what lets us work across the value chain rather than solving one problem at a time," said Dr Shivansh Singhal, Chief Science Officer at Nōka.

Live deployments to date include a research partnership with Keio Corporation on trout farming in Japan, alongside commercial work in Atlantic salmon production. Nōka is interested in exploring how the same approach could support feed, breeding, and health decisions in Scottish aquaculture, and welcomes conversations with SAIC members about potential pilots or data partnerships.

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