By Masaki Nakada, Founder and CEO of NeuralX
Despite decades of progress in ocean science, one fundamental challenge remains unresolved: the ocean is still largely unmeasured at biological resolution. While we monitor temperature, currents, and chemistry at scale, understanding how marine life behaves, grows, and responds to environmental change remains expensive, fragmented, and limited in scope. This biological data gap constrains sustainable aquaculture, ecosystem management, and our ability to anticipate environmental stress before irreversible damage occurs.
At NeuralX, we are closing this gap by transforming underwater video into quantitative biological intelligence. Our core innovation is a patented artificial life simulation engine that models fish morphology, biomechanics, and behavior under physically realistic environmental conditions. This engine enables us to generate large-scale, high-fidelity synthetic datasets that train AI systems to interpret underwater imagery with a level of robustness that real-world data alone cannot achieve.
Rather than relying only on historical footage — which is sparse, biased, and difficult to collect — our approach simulates how fish move, grow, school, feed, and respond to stress across a wide range of environmental scenarios. These simulations are grounded in physics and biology, allowing our AI to infer biomass, population counts, appetite, stress, and early disease signals from non-contact video feeds. The result is a system that can “see” underwater ecosystems quantitatively, without disturbing marine life.
This capability delivers immediate environmental and economic benefits. In aquaculture, feed accounts for 50–70% of operating costs and is the largest source of nutrient pollution. By accurately measuring fish biomass and appetite in real time, NeuralX reduces overfeeding by 10–20%, improves feed conversion ratios, and lowers ammonia discharge — directly improving water quality, fish welfare, and farm profitability. Healthier farmed populations also reduce pressure on wild fisheries, strengthening overall ocean resilience.
Beyond aquaculture, the same technology contributes to ocean science and ecosystem monitoring. Fish behavior often serves as an early indicator of environmental stress, such as hypoxia, harmful algal blooms, or temperature anomalies. By converting behavior into structured data, NeuralX enables earlier detection of ecosystem change and supports more adaptive, science-driven management of coastal and freshwater systems.
The Neptune Award meaningfully accelerates this mission. The funding supports expanded deployments, refinement of species-specific models, and large-scale synthetic data generation for rare or extreme conditions that are difficult to observe in the field. It also enables deeper collaboration with researchers, producers, and technology partners to ensure our data outputs are scientifically valid, operationally trusted, and broadly useful.
As NeuralX scales, we are actively raising venture capital to expand our simulation infrastructure, grow strategic partnerships, and accelerate global deployment. We are particularly interested in working with partners across aquaculture, sensing, cloud computing, and ocean science to build a shared biological data layer for the ocean.
Ultimately, NeuralX is not just building better AI — we are building the biological data infrastructure for the ocean. By making underwater life measurable at scale, we aim to enable healthier marine ecosystems, more resilient food systems, and a deeper scientific understanding of the living ocean.
Masaki Nakada is the Founder and CEO of NeuralX, an AI company building artificial life simulation and synthetic data infrastructure for ocean and aquaculture intelligence. He holds a Master’s degree in Physics from Waseda University and a PhD and Postdoctoral fellowship in Computer Science from UCLA, where he specialized in biomechanical and physics-based simulation. Over the past decade, his work has focused on modeling complex living systems using computer graphics, AI, and physical simulation.
In 2019, Masaki founded NeuralX to commercialize proprietary IP from his research, applying artificial life simulation to generate high-fidelity synthetic datasets for training underwater AI systems. NeuralX’s technology enables accurate, non-contact measurement of fish biomass, behavior, and health to improve sustainability and efficiency in aquaculture and ocean monitoring.
Masaki has been recognized as a MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 honoree, Forbes Next 1000, and recipient of the Hongo AI Award. NeuralX is also the recipient of the Ocean Exchange Neptune Award, recognizing technologies with the potential to create lasting positive impact on ocean health and the blue economy.
Contact: masaki@neuralx.ai
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/masakinakada/
