Our 2025 Year in Review

Haven King-Nobles
14 minutes ago
14 min read

Message from the Executive Director

If I had to characterize 2025 in a few words, I’d describe it as a year strong on foundations, but light on breakthroughs.

In some ways, this was not the year we had hoped for. None of our major research efforts—including remote sensing, feed fortification, and pre-slaughter stunning—yielded evidence that we, at this point, believe warrants turning these interventions into full pilot programs. While negative or mixed results should be expected in any rigorous R&D process, they are still, of course, disappointing.

At the same time, while we didn’t achieve the outputs we had hoped for, we believe 2025 was the strongest year for our inputs and processes yet. We initiated/ran multiple of our most complex studies, including our Data Campaign, Outcome Evaluation, and Dissolved Oxygen Tolerance Study. Our efficiency, SOPs, cross-departmental collaboration, and stakeholder relations also generally felt improved to our team. Projects and levels of rigor that previously didn’t seem feasible became so this year.

With our two-year 2026 Goal set to conclude at the end of this year, it remains to be seen whether we can leverage our improving levels of capacity into research breakthroughs, all with the hope of developing fish welfare interventions that are more scalable, cost-effective, and evidence-based than our current one. I remain optimistic.

Beyond India, 2025 was also the year when we began reinvesting in our China work: We hired two full-time staff there, and have since co-hosted another event and given input on local fish welfare standards. While our work in China will certainly take time to yield significant returns, we felt it important to continue building the foundations.

2025 was not just a year of foundation-building, however. Through our farm program, we improved the lives of an estimated 1.9M fishes. This was our largest annual impact to date, and put our organizational cost-effectiveness at about 3 fishes helped per dollar (despite the fact that only about 20% of our annual spending went towards this program). Even if we had achieved nothing else in the year, we likely would have felt that this made all the expenses worth it.

And so that was our year! In 2026, we’re looking forward to continuing to develop these interventions in the hope of that elusive breakthrough—and, as always, to improving the lives of many more fishes.

We hope you enjoy this post. It’s meant to be skimmable, so I encourage you to skip to the sections that most interest you.

And to all those who have made our impact possible, thank you. Our impact is yours.

—Haven

Executive Director, Fish Welfare Initiative

Our team during the FWI Strategy Week held in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh on October 2025.

Countries of Operation: India and China

FWI had significant operations in both India and China (via partner support) in 2025. India-focused work accounted for about 80% of our budget, while China-focused work accounted for about 20%.

In India, we largely continued with our strategy of a) implementing our farm program of improving fish welfare via water quality and stocking densities, while also b) seeking to develop new fish welfare interventions via our R&D initiatives. Internally, our work in India falls under the purview of our 2026 Goal, which is a two-year goal that aims to develop a new and improved fish welfare intervention by the end of 2026 (this year).

To learn more about our strategy in India, see our recent post.

Meanwhile, in China, we hired new staff and started initial outreach and collaboration with local partners—the first since we had paused our work in China at the end of 2023. Our team in China is currently small—just 3 staff—and our work is exploratory. Whereas in India our approach is bottom-up and aimed to yield immediate results, we expect our work in China to continue to be more top-down (i.e., involve working with various civil society and industry partners) and to involve longer time horizons for impact.

Given how significant a country China is for fish welfare, we believe it is well worth this investment.

FWI staffer Nagaraju measuring pH in the early morning hours as part of our farm program.

2025 Key Outcomes

We believe the following are the most important things we accomplished in 2025:

Impact

We improved the lives of an estimated 1.9M fishes in India via stocking density and water quality improvements (see our farm program).

Research and Development

We made significant progress on the following intervention development streams:

Water Quality Remote Sensing: We conducted two innovation challenges and have recently launched a data campaign to collect a vast amount of continuous water quality, in the hopes that we can use this data to train sufficiently accurate remote sensing models. Learn more.
Feed Fortification: We finished the analysis of our prior pond efficacy study (results: promising but mixed) and are now planning to launch our field study this quarter. Learn more.
Improved Slaughter (formerly stunning): We conducted three initial research studies to address the viability of pre-slaughter stunning in India. Unfortunately, they indicated that stunning was unlikely to be viable in India in the next few years, but they did inspire us to investigate “chill kill” as a more humane slaughter process. Learn more.

Unfortunately, none of these projects yielded breakthroughs that we can immediately leverage into improved programs. See more on this in the “Lack of programmatic breakthroughs” theme below.

Two of our continuous water quality monitors, during our two-week accuracy trial to determine which would later be used in our (now ongoing) Data Campaign. This campaign involves using 16 water quality monitors, alongside various handheld devices, in order to build a dataset to train models to predict water quality based on satellite imagery. We expect to wrap up the campaign in early February.

Evidence-Generating Studies Conducted

We conducted several studies for the purpose of building on the evidence base for our current programs. These included:

Dissolved Oxygen (DO) Tolerance for Rohu: We conducted a study assessing at what DO levels rohu fishes begin to exhibit indicators of poor welfare, which further supported the minimum thresholds set in our farm program. We intended to conduct an additional study on catla fishes as well, but unfortunately ran into a mass mortality event early on and then called off the study. Learn more.
Water Quality Outcome Evaluation: In August, we initiated an outcome evaluation to assess the extent to which our work contributed to counterfactually improving water quality on our program farms. Data collection for this study concluded on January 2, though unfortunately, due to an issue with our data collection, we expect that we will need to re-initiate data collection for another few months. Learn more.

Welfare Assessment Protocol Developed

We developed and field-tested a welfare assessment protocol for Indian major carps, the primary species farmed in India. We expect this protocol to be used by our (future) M&E team, a small 1 to 2-person team we expect to hire for this year.

Government Institute Partnership

We signed an MOU with a government fisheries research institute. This partnership is enabling us to access one of their research sites, which will be important for future studies we expect to run (e.g., an upcoming lab-based feed fortification efficacy test).

China

We achieved various important outcomes for our initial engagement in China, including supporting a local fish welfare event and also providing what we believe to be valuable input to one of our local partners, ICCAW, on their fish welfare standard for grass carp. However, likely the most important outcome for our China work in 2025 was simply the foundations—and, namely, the initial team—that we built.

The research facility of our new R&D partners. Left: The broader facility. Right: FWI’s newly constructed lab to be used for future studies.

2025 Key Themes

The following are the key themes that, for better and for worse, defined our work in 2025. The first six refer to our work in India, while the last one refers to our work in China.

We also surveyed several of our staff members about their views on our work this year. You can see their anonymized and lightly edited responses here.

1 - Strong Foundations: Efficient Processes and Improved Capacity

Our team generally felt that our systems, processes, and organization were stronger in 2025 than in prior years. This is likely partly a result of prior restructurings we had completed, and also a result of a more experienced and more professionalized team. Our studies and programs, while they didn’t always yield the results we had hoped for, were largely well-run.

A recent example of this trend is our recent Data Campaign, which has as its goal to collect a large amount of continuous water quality data so we might build remote sensing models. This campaign has involved installing and maintaining 16 continuous water quality monitors in participating farms. We managed to launch this campaign about 1 month after conceptualizing it, and have faced remarkably few issues. This is the sort of complex, stakeholder-dependent project that we would have struggled with much more even one year ago.

2 - Evidence-Building, but no Breakthroughs

While we had generally strong processes and studies, they did not yield any of the breakthrough results we were hoping for. Specifically:

Our two innovation campaigns did not yield any remote sensing models we believed would be sufficiently accurate to be programmatically useful.
Our feed fortification study yielded promising but mixed results.
Our stunning foundational research studies did not yield any viable avenue forward for pre-slaughter stunning in India.

Negative results are an important part of the research process, and we will continue to publish them as we get them. However, when we are conducting these studies with the hope of developing future interventions that will improve the lives of many more fishes than we have helped to date, these results are certainly disappointing.

At the same time, it’s important to note that 2025 was intentionally a year focused on exploration and evidence-building rather than implementation or scaling. We ran multiple studies, added a new intervention exploration stream through our Improved Slaughter / Chill Kill work, and invested in strengthening the evidence base for our existing programs. This included the development and field-testing of a Welfare Assessment Protoco l, our DO Tolerance Study, and an Outcome Evaluation of our farm program.

We hope to report back in our next year-in-review that we both conducted good processes and received positive results.

Our DO Tolerance study for Rohu. Each of the pictured containers contained 24 fishes. For the experimental group, we gradually reduced dissolved oxygen starting at 5 mg/L over 48 hours by injecting nitrogen gas, until the fishes began displaying significant welfare indicators.

4 - Leadership Transition

We lost several key leadership staff over the last year—Tom and Abhishek—both of whom went on to leadership roles in other organizations. See more on this in Staff Changes below. Losing any staff, but especially leadership staff, does present challenges to the organization, though we believe we largely managed them well.

5 - External Dependencies and Partnerships

Likely our largest operational setback in 2025 was the loss of our former R&D site, which came as a result of increasingly diverging expectations between FWI and our former partner. This was challenging for our team, delayed progress on a key study (feed fortification), and underscored the challenges associated with relying on external partnerships.

We have now transitioned to a new R&D site, this time with a new research partner. We expect this partnership will be more suitable for our work going forward, and have the added benefits and prestige that come from a government partnership.

6 - Ethical Questions Surrounding Live Animal Studies

We continued to have questions and occasional internal disagreements about processes and studies involving the use of live fishes. A few of the grey areas this year included:

Conducting dissolved oxygen tolerance studies, particularly when, despite the abundant precautions we take, they sometimes lead to mass mortalities.
Conducting fish sampling as part of developing the Welfare Assessment Protocol, when this means that farmers will inevitably pull out and kill any of the invasive species they find also in the nets.
Possibly euthanizing a small number of fishes to gain biological data for our upcoming fortified feed study. This would potentially have provided us with valuable information regarding our intervention, but we ultimately decided that it was a line we didn’t wish to cross.
Conducting chill kill trials, which do involve us killing fishes ourselves, though a) in a more humane way than they otherwise would die, and b) so far only at harvest events, so at the time the fishes would have been killed anyway.

We’re in this business to begin with because we care about animal welfare, and these are some of the more challenging decisions we make. We will likely continue to wrestle with these questions, and we intend to continue sharing our thoughts and decisions publicly.

7- China: Our Work Finally Comes Into Focus

We started researching fish welfare in China all the way back in 2020, when we conducted our first scoping research. While we have done work off and on there since then—notably with the support of our former colleague Lu Chen, who worked with us between 2021 and 2023—we have never seriously invested in the country.

That changed this year, with the hiring of two full-time staff in China (Aijun and Ryan) and the pivoting of one of our other staff (Siddharth) to spend more of his time on China. While it is still early, we believe this improved capacity has helped us develop a clearer understanding of the landscape and establish relationships to better inform our future work.

FWI staffer Aijun presenting the closing remarks at the World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare in Beijing.

Operational Information

The following may be of interest to those interested in the more technical aspects of FWI’s operations. All budgets, objectives and key results (OKRs), as well as some other documents, can be found on our Transparency Page.

	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026
OKR Average Attainment	68%	57%	68%	62%	TBD
Quarterly OKR (“QKR”) Average Attainment	64%	60%	80%	71%	TBD
Weekly Goal (“Big Goal”) Average Attainment	Not tracked	62%	72%	76%	TBD
Staff Size in FTE (full-time equivalent)	15 FTE as of January 2022	21 FTE as of January 1, 2023	20 FTE as of January 1, 2024	23 FTE as of January 6, 2025	26 FTE as of January 6, 2026
Annual Budget	$620K budgeted $480K spent	$660K budgeted $720K spent	$760K budgeted $587K spent	$823K budgeted $709K spent	$824K budgeted

Staff Changes

We began 2025 with approximately 23 full-time equivalent staff (FTE) and ended the year at roughly 26 FTE. 79% of our FTE is Indian; our remaining staff are from Greater China, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, the UK, the US, and the Philippines.

During the year, we experienced about 19% FTE-weighted turnover, consisting of roughly 10% voluntary and 9% involuntary turnover. Amongst the staff who left us, we were pleased to see several of them transition into other leadership roles in animal advocacy:

Tom, our cofounder, who departed in May and now splits his time between The Mission Motor and a new project focused on making change for animals in lower- and middle-income countries.
Abhishek, our former Project Lead, who now serves as the Executive Director of Sentient.

We are proud that our alums are contributing further to the broader animal movement.

In 2025, we welcomed 8 new staff:

Gokul, Shiva, Siva, Sai, and Sol, who joined our R&D team
Aijun and Ryan, who joined our China team
Varna, who joined our Programs team

New staff who joined FWI in 2025, pictured clockwise from top left: Aijun (China Representative), Ryan (China Program Manager), Varna (Programs Lead), Gokul (R&D Manager), Sol (Remote Sensing Lead), Siva and Sai (Project Associates), and Shiva (Facility Associate).

Financials

For 2026, we are budgeting about $830K, about the same as 2025. Many of our departments are projecting lower spending than last year, with the main exceptions being R&D, China, and the new M&E Department that we’re planning to hire for in 2026.

We spent about $709K in 2025. This was below our ~$820K budget, for the following reasons:

Our satellite imagery innovation challenge didn’t yield a model that met our minimum performance thresholds, and consequently, we didn’t pay out any of our budgeted reward money.
We also did not move forward with hiring for some budgeted staff roles.
We did not proceed with further work on stunning technology in India, as our internal analysis and commissioned external reports indicated it isn’t feasible right now.

We apply our same method using a discount to our 2026 budget to prevent overbudgeting. Learn more in our 2026 Budget.

On the revenue side, we raised $1.245M in 2025.

This consisted of individual donations from about 1000 different people or entities.
88% of our total revenue came from donations over $1K, larger grants from Strategic Animal Funding Circle, Open Philanthropy, and from the Farmkind Dwarkesh Match.
We earned $14K from a high-yield savings account that Stifel manages for us.
FarmKind itself raised an estimated $503K for us.

Because of this, we’re grateful to share that our 2026 funding gap is now fully covered—we discuss what that means and what we’re recommending to supporters on our blog.

As of this post’s publication date, FWI holds approximately $772K in liquid assets. See our most recent balance sheet for additional details.

Organizational Culture

This year, we rolled out a new quarterly pulse survey: a short, anonymous check-in designed to help us track how our team is feeling about FWI’s direction, leadership, and culture. We ran the first survey in October 2025, and we shared the key results and our next steps on our blog.

Board

FWI made some changes to its legal board in 2025. We said goodbye to the following board members:

Meanwhile, we welcomed some new ones:

Tony Senanayake
Ameer Virani (now serving as our board president)
Kyle Lucchese
Krzysztof Wojtas

Our board now comprises these four individuals in addition to the two remaining board members who stayed on from last year: Laura Gough and Haven (our executive director).

FWI’s legal board meets quarterly, and the board meeting minutes may be found on our Transparency Page.

The passing of the torch: Former and new FWI board members all meet.

Note of Gratitude

Though we include this just about every year, it’s important enough to warrant repeating: We are tremendously grateful to everyone who has made this work possible. This, of course, includes our donors, our partner farmers, and our NGO collaborators. It also includes our friends and family, who support us endlessly and, for many of our staff, endure their loved ones being away for long periods of time.

A special shoutout this year goes to:

All of our named and unnamed advisors on our China work, without whom this would not have been possible.
RMJ, our accounting firm, for continuing to provide us with good service and being flexible to our needs.
StoneX team—especially Maasa and Claudia—for being dependable and facilitating transparent, cost-effective cross-border payments.
Rahul and the rest of the Joyya team for printing our cool shirts!
FarmKind, for totally blowing it out of the park with how much money you have raised. You have certainly proven Haven wrong!
Gauri and People for Animals, without whom our policy work would not be possible.
ICCAW for being our first and longest partners in China. We are grateful to you!
The many aunties of Eluru, without whom our stomachs would be empty, and our offices would be dirty.
Levi and the team at Stifel, for both helping us make money off of our existing assets and doing so with such good cheer.
Kathy (Haven’s mom), for being our best (unpaid) administrative secretary that we could ask for.
All of the people who hosted our various staff members throughout the world. You have saved us many a hotel room cost!
SWP and Scale Welfare, for being the best partners and comrades in arms we could ask for.
Our board members, new and old.
Our interns Annika and Leroy. Thank you for all the work and good times—you both have inspired us to want to continue taking more interns.
The many people who have come to visit: Koen, Ameer, Oli, Rowan, Sanu, Sofia, Shruthi, Vaishnavi, Harshit, Kyle (round 2), and anyone else we may have forgotten. You are all always welcome!
Ambitious Impact—it all began with you!

And that’s our year! If you have read this far, we are thankful for your interest.

While we are proud of the millions of fishes we have helped so far, the road ahead is longer still: Even the animals who benefit from our interventions still endure a great deal of suffering, and there are billions more individuals in India alone whom our interventions do not reach at all. It is their lives that, most of all, motivate us to strive to improve and to keep working for a humane world.

Addendum: Life Around Work

Outside of our work, we also experienced our usual share of colorful moments. These included:

We dealt with a potential haunting in one of our new field offices.
We rescued and rehabilitated multiple street dogs.
We hosted (in our humble opinion!) the best parties at both AVA US and AVA India conferences.
We made the first scene of our upcoming FWI music video.
Our team now has so many motorbikes that our office appears to be a motorbike showroom.