Optical intelligence for milk testing

The dairy industry loses $32B to mastitis each year. The losses occur from decreased milk production, treatment and labor costs, non deliverable milk, veterinary fees, reduced milk quality, reduced milk price, increased risk of subsequent mastitis, culling and death of the cow according to the article published by the University of Glasgow. More than 95 percent of all dairy farms are family-run business with thin operating margins and low profitability. 

Labby is building a next-generation technology to help the industry transform its milk testing business, providing fast, accurate and affordable solutions for dairy farms. Labby's milk testing solutions deliver instant results on milk composition and quality information, including milk fat, protein, and somatic cell count (SCC), using advanced mobile spectroscopy and AI. 

This enables farmers to quickly identify clinical mastitis in the early lactation stage, reduce milk product yield loss, and improved milk profitability and operation efficiency.

The dairy industry loses $32B to mastitis each year. It is a dairy cow udder infection that reduces milk quality and production, and it raises the manufacturing cost for dairy products. 

There are 250 million cows around the world, and over 25% of them will get mastitis each year. Mastitis is hard to detect and it spreads easily among the herd. The total annual cost of mastitis is about $1.8 billion in the US and 4.6 billion in the EU.

Mastitis is hard to detect and it spreads easily among the herd. Milk testing for individual cows is the key to spot mastitis early on. Today farmers can only afford the milk testing service once a month. Between the dates, farmers have little information as to which cows are sick. 

Early detection is the key to prevent mastitis. Our solution provides rapid, cost-effective, and lab-grade accuracy milk testing. Labby’s hardware captures optical data from milk; the data will be processed by our AI algorithm to generate critical milk quality info. The results are uploaded to Labby’s cloud platform to make it accessible for dairy processors to monitor the milk quality.

Our targeting customers are 150 million dairy farms worldwide, in particular the family-run business who are at the risk of extinction who don't have access to the innovative tech innovations.

The great challenges for the dairy sector include bringing milk to the consumer at competitive prices while improving the animal welfare and focusing on the environmental sustainability. During our process to take our technology from the lab to the market, we have conducted intensive interviews to farmers from different regions with varied herd size in order to understand the key challenges they are facing. We also have set up the demo sites and pilot projects to educate the farmers how new innovation can help them achieve both profitability and sustainability. 

Today, we have had paid customers and are building up pilots in both the US and European regions. We also received inquiries from dairy farmers from africa and india who expressed interests to adopt our technology. 

Bovine mastitis is a common disease of high economic importance in dairy herds worldwide. About 20% of cows will experience mastitis during their lactation. Late mastitis detection leads to increased vet cost, high dairy product manufacturing cost, and widely used antibiotics treatment. 

The most effective way to prevent mastitis is by early detection, thereby improve milk profitability. With Labby, farmers can determine the milk quality in every drop of milk for every single cow. This allows them to easily identify cows with mastitis because cows often have no visual symptoms.

Currently, farm-level milk analyzers deploy lab-based techniques and instrumentation in dairy farms, including infrared spectrometers, microfluidic chips, and flow cytometer systems. They are expensive, complex to maintain, require consumables such as dyes or cassettes, and in many cases provide inaccurate results. Since every milking machine needs one such analyzer, the upfront hardware and integration costs are extremely high for the farmer.

We are addressing all these drawbacks through our innovations. First, we use UV-Vis spectrometers that use silicon detectors, which are much cheaper than infrared detectors. Second, we do not use any reagents, chemicals, or consumables to perform the tests. This lowers the cost and complexity of the system. Third, we achieve a high-test accuracy for milk composition, close
to standard lab instruments. This helps the farmer make the right interventions. Fourth, our system can quickly retrofit to both existing milking machines (conventional and robotic). This minimizes integration time and costs, making it attractive for farmers. Finally, we use artificial
intelligence engines to look at several aspects such as milk quality, geospatial features, lactation cycles, and other historical data to predict yield, health of the herd and supply chain intake for the dairy industry.

Our technology is based on UV-Vis optical spectroscopy and Artificial Intelligence. Non-invasively determine material composition using light. Molecules in materials absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light, which is used to identify and detect their concentration. 

Milk is a complex material, where constituents like fat, protein and SCC are organized in micro and nanostructures. These microstructures have distinct interactions with UV-Visible light like absorption and scattering. We extract these spectral signatures and use AI techniques to determine their concentration. 

We have one issued patent from the USPTO entitled ‘Mobile device based fluid testing apparatus’, US Patent 10,352,847, that was granted in July 2019.

The product demo video is here: https://youtu.be/njZqKNfXSr8

PR media links are here:

Labby is a TechStars 2020 company

Physicists come top in ‘deep tech’ start-up challenge

Drop of milk tells fat, protein, somatic-cell count, disease

Labby accepted in the DFA accelerator program 2019

We have three paid customers who together have husbands of dairy farms who would benefit from our product. 

Our goal is to serve the dairy farms in the top five dairy states of the US, which is about 9000 farms. 

With the next six month, we will roll out our first automated inline sensing product and will start the pilot in the fall with 2 clients.

Dairy is a complex industry. The technology integration alone takes time and funding. We are working with industry leading player to validate our technology and set up pilots to demo the technology feasibility and financial savings our solution can generate. 

Dairy is an industry that operates on the basis of trust and connections. It takes time to build the credibility as a technology provider so more and more farmers are aware of Labby. 

One of our core solution components is IoT hardware. We need some funding to continue our product development and pilot project installations. 

We have some paid customer and are expecting to roll out pail pilot in the US to generate some stream of revenue.

We have built strong partnership with the leading testing labs who can endorse our solution to their member farmers.

We have a capable and dedicated team members who are determined to make it work and bring the product out to our targeting customers. 

1. Julia Somerdin - Cofounder & CEO, full-time

2. Anshuman Das - Cofounder $ CTO full-time

3. Akshat Wahi - mechanical engineer, part-time

4. Jamie Zimmerman - advisor, DairyOne CEO

5. Prof. Nick Fang - advisor, MIT Mechanical Engineering Dept Prof

6. Aidan Connolly - advisor, Forbes Agtech Council 

We are a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists with complementary skills and backgrounds. Together we have over 20 years of combined experience in engineering, sales and marketing, and management. 

Ansh was a postdoc at MIT media lab, specializing in optical physics. 

Julia studied at MIT Sloan/SDM program with dual experience in both corp and startup world, with expertises in sales, marketing, product strategy and operation.

DairyOne, a certified dairy testing lab in Ithaca, NY, provides dairy farm access and milk samples access.

Delaval, a swedish dairy vertical solution provide, provides technology evaluation for Labby

AMS galaxy farm, a dairy farm in PA, is our piloting customer in the US. 

We generate revenue from two sources: one-time hardware charge plus a monthly SaaS based testing service fee.

We will immensely benefit from the connections and resources from MIT Solve community. We will also get to learn from other startup peers about their journey solving great challenges and apply some of proven methodology in our go-to-market approach.

We will also be able to interact with MIT Solve's corporate partners and benefit from their industry knowledge. 

The world needs brave entrepreneurs who have the vision and skills to realise our mission. By joining the sover community, we are looking forward to share and contribute what we do with the rest of you. 

Below are the areas we need help with:

1. Direct channel sales to dairy processors or dairy coops through hiring experienced sales executives
2. Strategic partnership with existing dairy testing labs to help them to cut down the operating cost.
3. Sales and marketing initiatives to build brand recognition through social media and attending industry related conference and seminar.

Strategic partners on 

• Dairy cooperatives: such as DFA
• Dairy vertical solution providers, such as: lely
• Dairy animal health companies: such as 
• Dairy animal feeds companies: Cargill
• Dairy focused NGO organizations, such as FAO, IFCN dairy network