We started as aquarium hobbyists who got tired of watching fish die from preventable causes. So we built the tool we wished we had.
AquaShelter started as an iOS app for aquarium hobbyists. We built tools for tracking tank parameters, scheduling maintenance, and identifying fish. It was useful — but we kept seeing the same problem everywhere.
Fish were dying. Not from complicated diseases. From wrong diagnosis, or from treatments that harmed the rest of the tank. Copper wiping out shrimp. Antibiotics crashing biofilters. A person who spent $400 building a tank, losing everything because they guessed wrong.
We knew there was a medical solution. UF IFAS Extension and Merck Veterinary Manual contain everything needed to diagnose and treat aquatic disease correctly. The problem was access — and the ability to apply that knowledge to a specific tank context.
So we built a medical RAG engine, integrated Google Gemini for context understanding, added a treatment safety layer that automatically blocks dangerous treatments based on tank inhabitants, and pointed the whole system at aquarium shop owners — the people who can actually help their customers when something goes wrong.
Make expert-level aquatic health guidance accessible to every fish owner on earth — through the aquarium shops that already serve them.
AquaShelter is one of the teams competing in the Build with Gemini XPRIZE 2026 — a $2M global competition to build real AI businesses in 90 days, powered by Google Gemini.
XPRIZE challenges teams worldwide to use Google Gemini to build businesses that solve real-world problems. AquaShelter addresses global aquaculture and hobbyist fishkeeping — a $5B+ industry where disease is the #1 cause of loss.
Production-grade infrastructure, not a demo.