Problem

Tornyol targets both the everyday nuisance of mosquitoes and the much larger public-health burden of mosquito-borne disease. Existing approaches are dominated by insecticides, which can harm people, pets, and ecosystems, or passive traps and nets that offer limited coverage. Tornyol says its low-cost drones could reduce mosquito-control costs by 100x, with an eventual ambition to make area-wide vector control economically viable against malaria, dengue, West Nile, and related diseases.

The initial killer use case is residential outdoor protection: a garden, porch, or dinner area where mosquitoes make evenings unusable. The proposed system would continuously patrol that defined space and eliminate mosquitoes without chemicals, while the broader use case is scalable protection of large urban or periurban areas where fixed traps or manual spraying are expensive and slow.

Product / Service

Tornyol is developing a 40-gram autonomous micro-drone paired with a charging base station. A user draws a protected zone on a map, after which the drone patrols continuously, detects mosquito wingbeat signatures with ultrasonic phased-array sonar, intercepts targets in mid-air with its propellers, and returns to recharge before relaunching. The sensing stack uses ultrasonic emitters, hundreds of smartphone-derived microphones, FPGA processing, and digital signal processing to build a real-time spatial picture and distinguish mosquitoes from other flying insects.

The intended delivery model is a consumer hardware-plus-service offering: a $50-per-month subscription with maintenance and software updates, or a $1,100 one-time purchase, preceded by a refundable $100 reservation. The value proposition is hands-off, always-on, chemical-free mosquito control with no installation or wiring; official ordering information targets U.S. deliveries for 2027, subject to regulatory approval elsewhere.

Market

Tornyol sits at the intersection of robotics and drones, smart pest control, and chemical-free mosquito abatement. Its alternatives include insecticides, mosquito nets, CO₂ traps, and passive electronic traps, as well as newer automated devices such as Bzigo’s vision-and-laser mosquito detector and Photon Matrix’s LiDAR-tracked laser system. Tornyol differentiates itself by actively pursuing mosquitoes in flight and by targeting larger areas rather than only detecting or luring insects at a fixed point.

The company is a Paris-based, active YC Fall 2025 hardware/robotics startup with seven people. It has demonstrated mosquito detection and tracking with its sonar technology, received a reported $28,000 grant, and is collecting refundable early-adopter reservations. However, the public evidence points to a pre-launch product rather than proven scaled revenue: YC described the integrated system as still being tested in simulation, and the official order page targets delivery in 2027. Third-party databases report venture financing, including a $3.5 million deal reported by PitchBook, but do not provide consistent evidence of current revenue or shipped commercial units.