Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Vic Levitin, CEO & Co-founder of Diptera.ai:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Diptera.ai is an Israeli company that is disrupting the $100 billion pest control market by democratizing sterile insect technique (SIT).
The sterile insect technique (SIT) is a biological pest control method, whereby overwhelming numbers of sterile male insects are released to suppress the wild pest population.
Despite its high effectiveness, SIT has thus far been limited to a handful of pests due to prohibitive costs in implementing it.
Through groundbreaking technology, Diptera.ai pioneers “SIT AS A SERVICE” – an affordable subscription service to a highly effective & eco-friendly, biological pest control method.
Most pest control methods are based on insecticides that are toxic to both humans and the environment.
Q: Who led your recent founding round?
A: The round was led by Trust Ventures with participation from existing investors Indiebio and Fresh.fund, as well as new investors who joined the round.
Recommended: DataDome Raises $35M Series B Funding Led By New-York Based Elephant
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: For most insects, the bottleneck for SIT is sex separation. Currently mosquitoes are sex-sorted late in their development when the mosquitoes are fragile and have a limited lifespan. As a result, implementing SIT requires building and maintaining a local mosquito factory near every release site.
Diptera.ai combines computer-vision, deep biology, and automation to sex-sort mosquitoes (and other insects) at the larval stage, which was previously considered impossible.
This allows for a centralized mass production of sterile male mosquitoes, and then shipment to the end customers for release.
“Just like the cloud disrupted the computing industry with affordable, on-demand computing power, Diptera.ai disrupts pest control with an affordable SIT-AS-A-SERVICE,” said Vic Levitin, CEO of Diptera.ai.
“Instead of building and maintaining insect production factories, customers will subscribe to our service to receive shipments of sterile males ready for release.”
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: Diptera.ai will be piloting the technology in 2022, towards a commercial roll-out with select US partners in 2023.
Recommended: TurnKey Makes Business Lending Available Out-Of-The-Box
Q: What is a great thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Climate Change Will Expose Half of World’s Population to Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050. Diptera.ai starts from solving the nuisance aspect, but we aim to utilize the same technology to ultimately save human lives.
