Cats having a jolly good time with a can of tuna. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Amid AI and tech startups, Eastseabrother proved the power of demand and trust.
Updated
December 31, 2025 2:18 PM
Cats having a jolly good time with a can of tuna. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
At a Silicon Valley pitch event crowded with AI, SaaS and deep-tech startups, the company that stood out was not selling software or algorithms. It was selling pet treats.
Eastseabrother, a premium pet food brand from South Korea, ranked first at a Plug and Play–hosted investor pitch competition in Sunnyvale. The product itself is simple: single-ingredient pet treats made from wild-caught seafood sourced from Korea’s East Sea. The company follows a principle it calls “Only What the Sea Allows”, working directly with regional fishermen while avoiding overfishing. With no additives and minimal processing, what sets Eastseabrother apart is not novelty, but control—over sourcing, supply chains and consistency.
That clarity helped the company walk away with both Best Product and Best Potential. “Investors asked detailed questions about repeat purchase rates and customer feedback, not just our technology or supply chain”, said Eunyul Kim, CEO of Eastseabrother. “That told us the market is shifting—real consumer trust now carries as much weight as a compelling tech narrative”.
What truly caught investors’ attention was not an ambitious vision of the future, but concrete evidence of traction today. Eastseabrother has already secured shelf space in specialty pet stores across California, New York and North Carolina, including an exclusive partnership with EarthWise Pet, a national specialty retail chain. At a consumer showcase at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, the brand recorded the highest on-site sales among all participating companies.
At its core, the pitch was built on simplicity: one ingredient, clear sourcing and a defined customer need. In a market saturated with complex products and abstract claims, that focus and transparency stood out.
The judges’ decision also reflects a broader shift in venture capital thinking. Not every successful startup is built on complex software or high-tech innovation. In categories like pet care—where trust, quality and transparency shape buying behavior—execution and credibility can matter more than technical sophistication.
Today, Eastseabrother has extended its reach beyond the U.S., expanding into Singapore and Hong Kong, with additional plans to grow further in North America as demand for premium pet food rises. And the broader takeaway from this pitch is not that consumer brands are overtaking tech startups. It is that investors are increasingly focused on fundamentals: who is buying, why they are returning and whether the business can sustain itself beyond the pitch deck.
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Can SPhotonix’s optical memory technology protect data better than today’s storage?
Updated
December 17, 2025 2:47 PM
SPhotonix's 5D Memory Crystals™. PHOTO: SPHOTONIX
SPhotonix, a young deep-tech startup, is working on something unexpected for the data storage world: tiny, glass-like crystals that can hold enormous amounts of information for extremely long periods of time. The company works where light and data meet, using photonics—the science of shaping and guiding light—to build optical components and explore a new form of memory called “5D optical storage”.
It’s based on research that began more than twenty years ago, when Professor Peter Kazansky showed that a small crystal could preserve data—from the human genome to the entire Wikipedia—essentially forever.
Their new US$4.5 million pre-seed round, led by Creator Fund and XTX Ventures, is meant to turn that science into real products. And the timing aligns with a growing problem: the world is generating far more digital data than current storage systems can handle. Most of it isn’t needed every day, but it can’t be thrown away either. This long-term, rarely accessed cold data is piling up faster than existing storage infrastructure can manage and maintaining giant warehouses of servers just to keep it all alive is becoming expensive and environmentally unsustainable.
This is the problem SPhotonix is stepping in to solve. They want to store huge amounts of information in a stable format that doesn’t degrade, doesn’t need electricity to preserve data and doesn’t require constant swapping of hardware. Instead of racks of spinning drives, the idea is a durable optical crystal storage system that could last for generations.
The company’s underlying technology—called FemtoEtch™—uses ultrafast lasers to engrave microscopic patterns inside fused silica. These precisely etched structures can function as high-performance optical components for fields like aerospace, microscopy and semiconductor manufacturing. But the same ultra-controlled process can also encode information in five dimensions within the crystal, transforming the material into a compact, long-lasting archive capable of holding massive amounts of information in a very small footprint.
The new funding allows SPhotonix to expand its engineering team, grow its R&D facility in Switzerland and prepare the technology for real-world deployment. Investors say the opportunity is significant: global data generation has more than doubled in recent years and traditional storage systems—drives, disks, tapes—weren’t designed for the scale or longevity modern data demands.
While the company has been gaining attention in research circles (and even made an appearance in the latest Mission Impossible film), its next step is all about practical adoption. If the technology reaches commercial viability, it could offer an alternative to the energy-hungry, short-lived storage hardware that underpins much of today’s digital infrastructure.
As digital information continues to multiply, preserving it safely and sustainably is becoming one of the biggest challenges in modern computing. SPhotonix’s work points toward a future where long-lasting, low-maintenance optical data storage becomes a practical alternative to today’s fragile systems. It offers a more resilient way to preserve knowledge for the decades ahead.