A new way to fight the world’s deadliest animal in your backyard
Mosquitoes are tiny and fragile, yet somehow responsible for more human suffering than almost any other animal on the planet. For something you can squash with a finger (if you can catch it) that’s a pretty impressive track record – one that didn’t quite sit right with Alex Toussaint and Clovis Piedallu.
The joke that started it all
Rather than writing it off as an unfortunate fact of life, the two French engineers now behind the fledgling startup Tornyol treated it like a solvable problem.
What began as a joke – what if we could build a drone that hunted mosquitoes? – is slowly becoming something you might one day see quietly hovering above a summer dinner table.
The idea lingered, then turned into back-of-the-envelope math, and eventually into a real engineering challenge.
Both had the right instincts for it. Toussaint had spent years working with ultrasonic sensing and navigation systems, building world-first machines that could “see” the world through sound. Piedallu, a longtime friend, brought deep experience in drone flight control.
If machines could guide missiles, land rockets, and park cars, they wondered, why was mosquito control still so crude?
The tech behind the mosquito hunt
At the heart of Tornyol’s approach is listening, not spraying. A small base station sends out gentle ultrasonic signals and waits for them to bounce back, similar to how parking sensors help cars avoid obstacles. The drones use those signals, along with sensitive microphones, to pick up the faint sound of mosquito wings as they move through the air.
Fingerprinting insects
To the system, however, that sound isn’t just a buzz. Every mosquito’s wings produce unique echoes, much like a fingerprint. Tornyol’s technology analyzes these echoes to pick mosquitoes out from other buzzing insects like wasps or flies, which is is crucial to avoid harming beneficial insects while targeting dangerous ones.
When the vision started to feel real
Tornyol’s turning point came when the idea jumped from “interesting experiment” to something people were willing to back. A $28,600 grant from Manifund – an organization known for supporting bold, hardware-heavy bets – gave the team early validation and breathing room.
Soon after, Tornyol was accepted into Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch, plugging the founders into a network of mentors, operators, and investors who’ve helped turn ambitious prototypes into real companies.
But the momentum hasn’t just come from money. Toussaint and Piedallu have been unusually open about the journey, sharing progress, setbacks, and breakthroughs through talks and blog posts.
That transparency has helped rally a growing community around the project – drawing in early supporters, potential pilot users, and the kind of talent that wants to help build something genuinely new.
From their lab to your backyard
Turning a clever idea into something people can actually use hasn’t been simple.
The pest-hunting drones have to spot mosquitoes reliably outdoors, where wind, background noise, and open space make everything harder.
They also need to stay in the air long enough to be useful – and do it safely around homes, people, and pets. Much of the work now happens at a very small scale, fine-tuning how the drones think and fly so everything works smoothly together.
The progress, though, is real. Tornyol has already shown that the system works in controlled tests – going as far as breeding mosquitoes in controlled conditions, while also feeding them their own blood – and the next step is taking it outside. At the same time, the team has locked down key patents, laying the groundwork for a proper launch.
