Krablr Raises $5 Million From Sequoia, Scranton Angels

Krablr, a real-time crab pricing engine for amateur fishermen, has raised $5 million from Sequoia with Strumpo Kildare and Scranton Angels as secondary investors. The company, founded in 2013 by Stanford alums Wilson Poney and Paul Paulson Black III, had a seed round of $3 million supplied by Michael Arlington’s CrUnd and Wobbly-Door Ventures in Palo Alto.

“The company is doing some amazing stuff in the fisheries space,” said Arlington in an email. Black agreed.

“We’re here to disrupt the way crab pricing is done on the shorelines of America,” he said. “My father was an amateur crabber and for decades he couldn’t get a straight answer: how much is this crab worth? Where can I sell it? If this crab were veal, how much would it cost? Nobody could answer that.”

To price the crab, you place it on your smartphone and the built-in magnetometer and biometric sensors weigh and categorize the animal. Then, when you approach the crab purchase point (the pair intend to make kiosks for crabbers to drop off their catch and are working with Highway 1, a hardware accelerator, to build the machines), your phone sends an inaudible signal – a Krinkle – to the kiosk to transfer the data and receive payment.

Poney plans to turn crabbing into the next bitcoin.

“Just like Bitcoin, Krablr is amazing,” he said.

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Why did CrUnd invest? Arlington’s love of crabbing is well known and he lives on Puget Sound where he and his dogs crab almost daily. “It seemed like a perfect fit,” said Arlington.

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is just that.

Krablr is in private beta and will launch in three years.