Table Of Contents
- Why a fish software company?
- What we're building
- What this means for Wakeflow
- Bigger picture
- Get in touch
Wakeflow Just Bought a Software Business
We've got some news we're properly excited about: Wakeflow has acquired ACSS, the company behind Aquarius — the software that runs the back office for fish and seafood processors across the UK.
Yes, fish software. Bear with me, because it's the most interesting thing we've done in a while.
Why a fish software company?
Aquarius is exactly the kind of product we love: deeply embedded in a real industry, trusted by its customers for years, and full of untapped potential for what modern cloud and AI tooling can do.
Fish processing is a fast-moving, thin-margin business. Orders come in by phone at dawn, prices shift daily, and the software in the middle has to just work. There's no room for a system that's down for the morning, and no patience for one that makes a busy office manager click through six screens to price an order. That's a challenge worth taking on.
ACSS was built over many years by Richard and Sarah, who are both staying on. They know their customers inside out. We bring a seven-strong development team and everything we've learned building AI systems on Google Cloud. That combination is the whole point of the deal — neither half of it works on its own.
What we're building
Two things are already in development:
- A new version of Aquarius. AI features, much better reporting, and a modernised platform underneath. The same product the industry already relies on, running on infrastructure we can actually ship improvements to — daily rather than every couple of years.
- An AI-powered ordering app. This lets our customers' customers place orders directly, including by phone and chat, with AI handling the conversation. Everything syncs live with Aquarius, so an order placed by voice at 5am lands in the office system the same way a typed one does.
If you've ever wondered what "AI in a traditional industry" looks like in practice rather than in a pitch deck, this is it. We'll share what we learn as we go — including the parts that don't work first time.
What this means for Wakeflow
Nothing changes for our client work. The same team is still building MVPs, RAG systems and agents for our clients, at the same pace.
But owning a product in a real vertical sharpens everything we do. We now run the software we'd normally hand over — we're on the hook for the uptime, the support calls, the migration that has to happen on a Sunday night. That's a different kind of understanding than you get from shipping a project and moving on, and it feeds straight back into how we build for everyone else.
Bigger picture
There's a large amount of software like Aquarius out there: profitable, quietly essential, running an entire industry from a server in a cupboard, built by a founder who's now thinking about what comes next. For a long time, modernising that kind of system was economically hard to justify — understanding a decade-old codebase, writing the missing tests, and refactoring it piece by piece was simply too expensive for the size of the market.
That maths has changed. AI agents are getting genuinely good at exactly that grind, which means a small team can now take on work that used to need a small army. So the interesting move isn't building another horizontal AI tool. It's taking software that already has trusted customers and a real business around it, and giving it the platform it deserves.
And we're not stopping at one.
Get in touch
If you know a UK software business owner thinking about retirement or a new chapter for their product, get in touch — we'd love to talk. Same goes if you're in fish and seafood processing and want to see where Aquarius is heading.
And if you just want to talk about what AI actually looks like inside a traditional industry, I'm always up for that conversation.
Andi, Founder, Wakeflow
