eFishery was Indonesia's first unicorn — $600 million of its revenue was fake

eFishery was founded in 2013 by Gibran Huzaifah, a Bandung Institute of Technology graduate who had experienced the inefficiency of aquaculture first-hand. The company built an IoT smart fish feeder that dispensed feed automatically, solving a real problem: feed costs represent 70–90% of a fish farmer's expenses. The product worked, farmers adopted it, and investors poured in. By 2023, eFishery had raised a $200 million Series D round from SoftBank Vision Fund, Temasek, and Northstar, reaching a $1.4 billion valuation — the world's first aquaculture unicorn.

The company was running two sets of books. The external version showed rapid growth: $752 million in revenue for the nine months to September 2024, with a $16 million profit. The internal version told a different story: actual revenue was about $157 million, and the company was losing $35 million. Investigators later estimated that roughly 75% of reported sales were fabricated — nearly $600 million in inflated revenue, maintained since roughly 2018.

The fraud was exposed in December 2024 when an insider alerted the board to accounting irregularities. The board suspended Gibran and deputy Andri Yadi, installed an interim CEO, and brought in FTI Consulting for a forensic review. In January 2025, a leaked draft of FTI's report made headlines. By February, shareholders had handed control to FTI. The company's claimed 400,000 smart feeder units turned out to be about 24,000 functioning devices.

Gibran Huzaifah was sentenced to nine years in prison for embezzlement and money laundering, reduced to six years on appeal in July 2026. Andri Yadi received seven years, reduced to four. Investors lost heavily: Malaysia's KWAP pension fund alone sought to recover RM163.4 million. The case became a landmark for Indonesia's startup ecosystem, illustrating how a genuinely useful product could be undermined by fabricated financials.