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Pest detection startup RapidAIM raises $1.25 million less than one month after launching

By Administrator | 22 October 2018

A less-than-a-month-old startup founded by three scientists has received a $1.25 million investment from Main Sequence Ventures to crack down on one of the world’s most prevalent food pests: fruit flies.

Founded by CSIRO researchers Dr Nancy Schellhorn, Darren Moore and Laura Jones, RapidAIM was initially born inside CSIRO as a research project, before being spun into a tech startup through the organisation’s ON accelerator.

The startup offers fruit fly detection and monitoring through a network of smart sensors which send real-time data to farmers and growers, providing them with updates on the prevalence of the pest on their crops.

Speaking to StartupSmart, Schellhorn describes RapidAIM’s technology as providing a “behavioural fingerprint” of the pest, which is leaps and bounds ahead of the current manual trap-checking method used to monitor fruit fly infestations.

A scientist by training, Schellhorn says she was aware of the over $300 million fruit fly infestation problem in Australia and had been working within CSIRO to develop ways to combat the pest.

“I’ve been working with cotton, vegetable and grain growers for the past 25 years, and it’s always been a challenge for them to detect and control insects,” she says. Read more

Dominic Powell - Startup Smart - 22 Oct 2018

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