Ripple: A bio-inspired smart trap to prevent mosquito-borne epidemics

Preventing mosquito-borne epidemics, with the first bio-inspired mosquito birth control. 

Pranav Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO of Nymphea Labs

The challenge: How to prevent and monitor outbreaks of existing and new mosquito-borne epidemics? 

In 2020, more people died in Africa from malaria than of COVID-19; killing one child every two minutes. Over 3.2 billion people are at risk of mosquito-borne epidemics every year.

There is an increasing risk of global pandemics nowadays due to:

• Deforestation
• Climate Change
• Antimicrobial resistance 

A single mosquito can lay up to 200 eggs at a time in stagnant water. There is growing research that suggests that insecticides such as DEET and BTi negatively impact wetland ecosystems. On the other hand, vaccine and pesticide development is slow and expensive. Hence, we are developing a bio-inspired and chemical-free alternative to prevent mosquito-breeding in stagnant water bodies. 

To start with, we will focus on: 

1. Infectious Disease: Anopheles-borne disease such as malaria and West Nile Virus 
2. Geography: South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America
3. Demography: Semi-rural and rural areas

Moreover, there is a large gap in accurate and real-time entomological data due to the currrent mosquito surveillance methods, which are labour-intensive, time-taking and expensive.  

The primary users of our solution are individuals and organisations in malaria endemic regions. However, most of them are in the “bottom of the pyramid”, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, and cannot pay for the device, Hence we have two ways to reach them: 

1. B2B: Companies such as Unilever, located in high-risk regions, who are willing to protect their employees and neighbourhood as part of CSR 

2. B2G: Public health agencies like UNICEF and NGOs such as “Médecins Sans Frontières'

To understand the needs of our end clients, we are reaching out to the following groups through our personal and professional networks: 

• Individuals living in areas with high risk of mosquito-borne disease
• corporate professionals having operations in endemic regions 
• vector control program managers

In the coming 3 months, we will be shipping our prototypes to these stakeholders, for testing and feedback in their diverse field conditions. 

Our goal is to protect at least 10 million people from mosquito-borne epidemics by 2025. This is less than 1% of the annual global burden, and we believe it is well within reach. The impact can be measured at the local level by monitoring the weekly cases of infection that each hospital near the deployment area detects. 

Our solution can help achieve the following UN SDGs in the given causal order: 

1. SDG 6 - Clean water and sanitation, 

2. SDG 3 - Good Health and wellbeing 

3. SDG 1 - No poverty (malaria is considered as a direct cause of poverty, as it is a major cause of loss of livelihood in Africa)

Direct impact: 

• Prevent incidence of infections and death among children and marginalised communities

• Early-warning on outbreaks and spread of epidemics

Indirect impact: 

• reduced loss of livelihood

• reduced economic burden of disease on the government

• Increased well-being of local communities and better prospects for the tourism industry. 

Starting from our goal of protecting at least 10 million people by 2025, we have set ourselves annual targets for the number of devices to deploy. 

2021: 3-5 Pilot projects with up to 20 devices each, primarily on large private farms and ranches.

2022: Install at least 1000 devices, through CSR partnerships with corporates such as TATA in India, and Unilever in Brazil. Given that each device prevents 100k mosquitoes from breeding annually, this would prevent 100 million mosquitoes from breeding and potentially transmitting disease.

2023: Install at least 10,000 devices, through partnerships with public health agencies and local NGOS. This will prevent 1 Billion mosquitoes from breeding and protect at least 1 million people.

Since mosquitoes stay within 1km of their breeding site, our monitoring device can count mosquito populations representative of 1km radius. 

Hence where ever we install our mosquito control devices, we just need to install one IoT Monitoring device to measure the reduction in mosquito population in the area. We can correlate this with clinical data from the nearest hospital treating the disease.

Our end targets are these three regions which account for over 90% of the mosquito-borne disease burden: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America.

Scaling in Africa poses various challenges when it comes to distribution costs and IoT coverage and compatibility. Lack of infrastructure to conduct cloud-based operations in remote areas is one of the main issues right now. We are looking at alternative communication protocols and keeping a keen eye on the upcoming telecom infrastructure in Africa.

Another challenge is to get enough market traction to get to the right opportunity at the right time (luckily we have good organic growth as of now).

We are an independant Paris based startup which is currently incubated at ESSEC Ventures since January 2021. Being current management students at ESSEC Business School, ESSEC Ventures, which is amongst the top incubators in Europe, proved to be the perfect starting point for us.

Our dream is to become an "impact unicorn": a term coined by Sir Ronald Cohen, which refers to a Tech4Good startup which impact over 1 billion people! 

We have been pitching our solution to European impact investors and VCs, but it is very hard to raise funds for such a "Bottom of the Pyramid" innovation. 

The prize and recognition by Trinity Challenge is one of our main hopes to keep the project alive and make an impact in the world! 

We would like to partner with the following member organisations of the Trinity Challenge:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Global Virome Project
• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation