Overview

OnDeck AI is an active Vancouver-based startup founded in April 2022 by Alexander Dungate and Sepand Dyanatkar. Originally incorporated as OnDeck Fisheries AI, the company built computer vision software to automate fish biomass counting and species identification from shipboard video — replacing costly human observers in commercial and regulatory fisheries monitoring. It deployed in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica, attracted support from National Geographic, Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, and the Government of Canada, and won a $1.5M grant from Canada's Ocean Supercluster in October 2023.

This is not a post-mortem. OnDeck is a live company that used a niche, high-friction vertical as a paid R&D environment, validated a generalizable technical insight, and deliberately pivoted to a larger market before the original vertical could constrain it.

In January 2025, having reached approximately $150K ARR in fisheries, the founders pivoted to a general-purpose enterprise vision infrastructure platform — one that lets organizations analyze any footage without training a model. By October 2025, the company had grown from $0 to six-figure ARR post-pivot, secured a $160K pilot with the Singaporean Military, and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch. The fisheries chapter was not a failure; it was a deliberate proving ground that stress-tested the technology in conditions most AI vision startups never encounter.

Founding Story

Alexander Dungate and Sepand Dyanatkar have been close friends since grade six — a founding dynamic that is either a strength or a liability depending on how conflict gets handled, though in this case the partnership has held through three years of pivots and co-founder departures.^[1]

Dungate studied Computer Science and Biology at the University of British Columbia, where coursework on global fisheries management surfaced what he described as "egregious, existential problems" in the industry.^[2] He became a National Geographic Explorer and developed a specific thesis: fisheries monitoring was a rate-limiting step for sustainable fisheries management globally, and "nothing's changed in 20 years."^[3] In 2021, he pitched the idea to Dyanatkar and a third friend, Matthew Leighton, who would become CFO.

Dyanatkar brought the technical depth the idea required. He holds a Master's in machine learning (specializing in multi-agent reinforcement learning) from Cambridge University, and had worked at the European Space Agency and Amazon before co-founding OnDeck.^[4] His background in swarm robotics and distributed ML systems would later prove directly relevant to the company's VLM decomposition architecture.

The three incorporated OnDeck Fisheries AI in Vancouver in April 2022.^[5] The name was deliberate — domain-specific rather than platform-oriented, signaling a vertical focus at inception. Within months, the company was winning startup competitions: first place at the University of Washington's Dempsey Startup Competition ($25K USD) in May 2022, and first place in Canada's Ocean Idea Challenge ($10K CAD) in August 2022.^[6]

By fall 2022, the founding team had contracted. Matthew Leighton stepped back to return to his PhD at Simon Fraser University.^[7] The terms of his departure — including any retained equity — are not publicly disclosed. Dungate and Dyanatkar continued as a two-person founding team, hiring their first software engineer and assembling an advisory board that included Dr. Daniel Pauly and Dr. Rashid Sumaila, two of the most cited fisheries scientists in the world.^[8]

The initial vision was explicitly domain-specific: build the electronic monitoring infrastructure that global fisheries regulators needed but couldn't afford to deploy at scale. The pivot to general-purpose enterprise vision infrastructure in January 2025 was not a repudiation of that vision — it was a recognition that the underlying technology had outgrown the vertical that produced it.

Timeline

• 2021 — Alexander Dungate pitches fisheries AI concept to Dyanatkar and Leighton after UBC coursework identifies systemic problems in global fisheries management^[2]