DipteraCSO Elly Ordan (left) and CEO Vic Levitin (Center).(Photo courtesy of Diptera)
Diptera.ai is a new Israeli startup which offers a new way to deal with mosquitos: The company will fight mosquitoes with mosquitoes. Dipteria raised $3 million in seed funding from Trust Ventures with participation from existing investors IndieBio and Fresh.fund, as well as new investors who joined the round.
No one likes mosquito bites. They itch like crazy and can even hurt and bleed. According to National Geographic, there are 3,000 species of mosquitoes in the world and they transmit more diseases than any other creature. They are not only a nuisance, but mosquitoes also carry deadly diseases like malaria. Mosquito-borne diseases cause millions of deaths worldwide every year and have a lop-sided effect on children and the elderly in developing countries. The three worst kinds of mosquito are Anopheles mosquitoes which are the only one known to carry malaria. They also transmit encephalitis. Culex mosquitoes carry encephalitis, filariasis, and the West Nile virus. And Aedes mosquitoes carry yellow fever, dengue, and encephalitis.
Disperia explains that Mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, Zika and malaria infect hundreds of millions every year. Global warming is driving these mosquitoes to spread rapidly, endangering many more. Diptera.ai’s technology cuts the cost of SIT – a natural and highly efficient insect birth control method – to make it a widespread solution against mosquitoes.
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Now think of all of the money wasted every year on protection against mosquitos. Sprays, traps, plug-in devices which supposedly deter them from coming near you, etc. And mosquitos still somehow find a way to get close enough to bite us. The worst is waking up in the morning to discover that you have been bitten up all over.
So how does Diptera.ai fight mosquitoes? It uses the Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) method to get them to mate with sterile mosquitos. The idea here is to release numerous sterile males of a species into the wild so that the females will mate with them and not produce offspring. Dipteria uses non GMO tech which it says eliminates the need for every local area to do all the hard and expensive work of implementing SIT on its own.
“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.”
