It started with a sardine and a grandfather.

A lesson at age five

Yudai's love of fish began at five, fishing with his grandfather. One day they caught more sardines than a child could care about, and he started tossing the dead ones back into the water for fun. His grandfather, who had fished to survive as a boy during the war, was furious. The lesson stuck: we live by taking these animals, so handle them with care. Food has stayed at the center of his life since then. Spearfishing, the fish market in every city he visits, and cooking what he finds there.

Learning the trade from the water up

At 20 he lived in the United States for the first time and found the fish tasted worse. The difference was handling. He wanted high-quality fish to be available everywhere, so after university he joined Mitsubishi Corporation as a seafood distributor, handling tuna.

Paper and screens were not enough. He left to work as a fisherman on yellowtail farms in southern Japan: on the boat at 4 a.m., bleeding and packing fish until evening, seven days a week in the coldest months of the year. He wanted to speak with people in this trade as one of them.

The problem he kept running into

Selling food, orders came in all day by text, email, phone, WhatsApp and fax. You triple-check with your manager so nothing is lost. You miss a call while on the floor, call back, and nobody picks up. It felt normal at the time.

After three years at McKinsey, Yudai moved to the US and interviewed hundreds of distributors. The same problem came up every time. Every earlier fix had asked the restaurant to change how it orders, and restaurants do not do that. The fix had to live on the distributor's side, inside the tools they already use.

Partnering with Ben

Yudai spoke with more than a hundred engineers before meeting Ben, an AI engineer at Google who had worked on Gemini and wanted to bring AI into food. They shipped a first version within a month. Asakana joined Y Combinator in 2026.