Castine digital shellfish tag developer raises $4.1M to expand market
COURTESY / BLUETRACE
Chip Terry started BlueTrace in Castine in 2021 and has more than doubled its clientele. He’s seen here at Community Shellfish in Bremen.
Castine software startup BlueTrace said it raised $3.2 million in seed funding, bringing the company’s fundraising total to $4.1 million toward a goal to expand its market.
Over the past year, BlueTrace more than doubled its client base, from fewer than 150 to over 350 across an expanding platform of seafood species, in every coastal state except Hawaii and Mississippi and every coastal Canadian province.
Founder Chip Terry developed a digital tracing system for seafood harvesters, growers, distributors and dealers that lets users print tags with a QR code and send reports to regulators and buyers with a click of a button.
The latest funding round was led by Manchester, N.H., startup investment firm York IE; Maine Venture Fund, a business investment fund in Newport that was created by the Maine Legislature in 1995; and Brunswick-based Coastal Enterprise Inc.; with participation from various angel investors, including SeaAhead, a blue economy startup consultant in Boston.
“Our mission is to keep the seafood supply chain safe, efficient and compliant by digitizing key transactions to make seamless traceability possible,” Terry said in a news release. “We have a long list of desired features from our clients — this new funding will help us deliver them.”
Joe Raczka, co-founder and managing partner at York IE, joined BlueTrace’s board of directors. Raczka will collaborate with board members Abigail Carroll, an oyster farmer turned investor and podcaster, and Dave Ford, a tech entrepreneur and angel investor.
“BlueTrace is bringing a unique digital solution to a traditionally non-digital, tech-laggard industry,” Raczka said.
After identifying a need to manage and track harvests in the shellfish market more effectively, Terry and his partners founded BlueTrace, formerly known as Oyster Tracker, in 2018. After initial traction with shellfish harvesters and distributors, BlueTrace has begun expanding its digital platform to support the broader seafood landscape.
Seafood organizations of any size can use BlueTrace’s cloud-based solutions from their smartphones to create logs for data such as harvest, food safety (HACCP), receiving, shipping and cooling, and to tag their products. The system is designed to allow employees to easily track and trace shipments.
“Our company moves millions of pounds of seafood each year, which obviously means a lot of moving parts,” said Joe Lasprogata, vice president of new product development at Philadelphia-based Samuels Seafood Co. “BlueTrace’s platform helps us organize our shipments and give us confidence that we’re staying compliant. ”
BlueTrace has won two Small Business Innovation Research grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees fishery regulations.
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