Natalie Duncan

Six Questions for Natalie Duncan – Co-Founder and CEO of Bug Mars in Canada

Natalie, born and raised in Ontario, is neither entomologist nor computer scientist, but studied the arts at the University of Toronto, Glasgow School of Art and Fleming College. In exploring the universe of the university, she ran into cricket farmers, which sparked an interest. Years after having started with boxes of crickets at home, her struggles to scale-up to commercial farming led her to a collaboration with an IoT friend to apply his digital infrastructure expertise to the challenges of insect farming, and in diving deeper came to appreciate how massively the whole “industry” needed better solutions. This led them to jointly launch Bug Mars in 2021.

1. What problem is Bug Mars solving and how?

There is rapidly growing interest in insects as a sustainable source of nutrition for the human food chain worldwide, especially as a substitute for soy. Soy is increasingly recognized as a non-sustainable crop in many instances – it is resource intensive and a major driver of deforestation in many regions. Regulatory restrictions such as the 2023 EU Deforestation Regulation is demanding that producers in the $155 billion soy industry find alternative solutions. But the insect “industry” is at very early stages in its development, perhaps like livestock ranching several hundred years ago. Operational costs are high, colony losses can be excessive and farming practices are inefficiently manual. We are applying the broad notion of “precision agriculture” to insect cultivation with sensors and AI analytics to refine, optimize and scale production as a food input.

2. What is your background that led YOU to co-founding Bug Mars?

Well, completely non-intuitive with alot of serendipity, but that just shows that anyone can be an innovator and entrepreneur. I was pursuing courses of study in the fine arts both at home in Ontario and two years getting an MFA in Glasgow. In my art studies, I got really involved in environmental monitoring as you know cultural heritage objects and really delicate objects require very specific environmental controls which today is all about microsensors and programmable adaptiveness. So, I learned coding and made some tech savvy friends. At the same time, in the university community I met folks who were into sustainable agriculture and was introduced to cricket farming, which piqued my curiosity. Later, I decided to scale up my box-of-crickets at home into a commercial farm and repeatedly failed! I felt that what was needed was more precision control, so I asked one of my IoT friends from earlier to assist. As we were coming up with an effective solution, we came to appreciate that no one else was doing this level of work for “insect farming” – which, yes, is becoming a measurable segment of agriculture. So, my friend and I decided – let’s go into business!

3. What is unique about your technology and what is its validation status?

Our software, Hexapod, provides an entomologist-as-a-service AI/ML engine that intakes detailed sensor data to analyze performance, and improve operations by streamlining, and even eliminating processes and tasks of an insect farm. All of these are aimed at reversing the problems cited in [1] above: precision cultivation can optimize growth and health and so reduce colony losses, that and reducing inefficiency lowers operating costs, and our simulated environments also address challenges of shared risk in the adoption of new tech in farming, by reducing overall hardware costs. For example at NVIDIA GTC we announced our new digital twin feature.

So, looking ahead we are focusing on predicting and analyzing disease spread to enhance containment strategies. We are modeling outbreaks, pinpointing patient zero, and using computer vision to upgrade our insect batch tracking system. This system, vital for managing the life cycle of insects, will be enhanced with machine learning, improving accuracy in health and growth monitoring, and ensuring task efficiency.

4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?

We have several pilots operating, we are being used by researchers at Carleton University in Canada and the United States Department of Agriculture and have been awarded several non-dilutive grants as well as some private angel funding. And we have received a lot of interest from the edible insect community, which has been helped by being awarded at places like NVIDIA GTC and matriculating into the Extreme Tech Challenge community.

5. What is next?

So far, our solution is more of an enterprise-scale product with intake from edge IoT devices and advanced services like the digital twin feature announced at NVIDIA GTC. Then, just last month at the ‘Insects to Feed the World’ conference in Singapore, Bug Mars announced a more comprehensive “freemium” strategy to offer routine task management and basic services “in the cloud” to small farmers, and then scale up with paid add-ons towards the more in-depth AI/ML and predictive services. This aims to grow our market in two ways. First, there are a lot more small-scale insect farmers than enterprise-scale. And our tools can help those small farmers grow for their greater success and to move them up our product chain.

And, while sending bugs to Mars isn’t on our roadmap… we are, in fact, aiming to get bugs on the International Space Station – in a good way. Not just for the publicity, but we are actually after the accelerated insights we can gain from studying their behaviors and latent virus activation in microgravity’s unique conditions.

Also we are gearing up to raise a seed round of funding this Fall.

6. Tell us about your experience with XTC.

I had the extreme opportunity to show-off Bug Mars on two global stages thanks to Extreme Tech Challenge, right in the belly of high tech innovation in San Jose at NVIDIA GTC. Seriously, I got to share a stage with robot dogs! But that wasn’t even the highlight – connecting with other global founders who are shaping the future of climate change with their AI solutions was the best part of this experience for me. Nobody can understand the unique challenges of entrepreneurship in today’s geopolitical and economic landscape as well as other entrepreneurs, and being able to share resources and validate one another’s experiences (even through geographical and cultural differences) is a memory I won’t soon forget.