Bedford, N.S.-based Ashored Innovations has a pair of key choices to make this month or the next, chief business development officer Stephen Jones said in an interview Tuesday, as the maker of rope-on-command fishing gear looks to capitalize on shifting attitudes from customers and regulators.

Ashored is preparing to begin mass producing its technology, but Jones said the team must first settle on a manufacturing process that can be replicated in other markets around the world, including choosing whether to outsource the work. And that decision, in turn, will be influenced by whether the team decides to sell the equipment outright or offer it to fishers under a less common leasing model.

Ashored has developed a system that can be attached to a series of crab or lobster traps, whereby a rope remains coiled around the device until an acoustic signal orders its deployment, allowing the traps to be retrieved. The system is designed to protect whales and other marine animals from being ensnared in the ropes from conventional fishing gear.

“We’re transitioning now from a primarily R&D company to a production, commercial entity,” said Jones. “So we need to make a decision, are we going to do that in-house or are we going to outsource it, or outsource part of it? And if so, who are we going to outsource it to?

“Our office, up to this point, we have the capacity to make 15 units a week, and we’re going to need to make maybe 100 units a week.”

If Ashored sells its rope-on-command systems outright, Stephenson said they will need to cost about $2,800 per unit, with some fishers needing to purchase 40 or 50, making the cost prohibitive for most operations and limiting the available market. Under a leasing model, though, fishers would buy the use of the equipment for a single fishing season, with Ashored then relocating the gear to be used elsewhere.

The leasing model offers enough potential savings in up-front costs for fishers that Jones expects the company will actually need to manufacture a larger number of traps for a leasing model than if it attempts to sell them outright — this despite rotating fishing seasons in many regions meaning the gear could remain in use close to year-round.

And although Ashored's technology uses a hub on the boat that communicates with the rope systems via acoustic signals, the actual pulses are vanishingly short, Jones added, and outside the hearing range of most marine animals.

Part of the reason Ashored is pushing for mass production now is a growing acceptance of the technology’s usefulness among its potential customers, driven in significant part by ongoing closures of key fishing zones in North America and elsewhere. Those closures, typically made in response to the presence of endangered whale species, like the North Atlantic right whale, can decimate a fisher’s season. But they also typically include an exception that allows boat operators with rope-on-command gear to continue their activities.

Canada routinely implements such restrictions when right whales are spotted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, for example, and South Africa has implemented no-fishing zones to protect its endangered penguin populations.

“For fishermen, it’s sort of like an insurance policy that, if your fishing zone was forced to close because of a North Atlantic right whale sighting, you know you have a way to fish,” said Jones, describing a sharp uptick in interest from potential customers as such closures have become more common — particularly since the seasons for many fish are so short one closure can completely derail operations.

“They’re quite happy to pay a nominal fee and have the gear on hand because they know at a moment’s notice, if the zone is closed, they can keep earning a living.”

Ashored currently has 14 employees, with plans to hire more, including elsewhere in the world. Once Ashored has settled on a manufacturing model at home in Atlantic Canada, Jones said, he expects to replicate the model elsewhere in the world to provide better access to a range of markets, citing Australia as one likely example.

The company's last capital raise was a seed round led by Californian impact fund Builders Vision in 2022, which has also been among the earlier investors to sign on to a larger funding round Ashored currently has open. Ashored connected with the fund via Memorial University's oceans stream of the internationally recognized Creative Destruction Lab startup accelerator.

"The critical thing now is for us to act quickly and scale up," said Jones. "Because as soon as the regulations mandate rope-on-command fishing, we're going to have to be in a position to fill a market need very quickly."