People have been trying to fend off mosquitoes for thousands of years – using methods ranging from physical barriers to chemical insecticides – but a Chinese start-up is now taking pre-orders on a hi-tech solution that uses lidar detection and lasers to zap them out of the air. Photon Matrix Lab, based in Changzhou, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, said it expected initial monthly production of the device – which became a breakout hit in overseas crowdfunding – to be between 3,000 and 5,000 units. Lawrence Leng, the firm’s sales director, said the first batch was expected to ship later this month. The device comes in two versions, one with an infrared laser and the other with a blue laser, priced at US$988 and US$1,088 respectively, according to the company’s website, which said they would ship within 120 days of the receipt of a pre-order. It said both offered the same mosquito-killing performance, but the infrared version, with an invisible laser, was designed for indoor settings, while the blue laser version, with a visible beam, was better suited to gardens and outdoor use. Leng said Photon Matrix Lab had received more than 5,000 orders since the crowdfunding stage, mainly from Europe and North America, followed by the Middle East. “This distribution aligns with the product’s core value: in markets where pesticide use is restricted or chemical control is less accepted, purely physical mosquito-killing solutions are clearly more accepted,” he said. Photon Matrix Lab said the device, which looks like a power bank, used high-precision lidar to scan its surroundings, detect small, slow-moving flying objects, and trigger its attack mechanism. It could also identify people and large animals and shut down before they entered the strike zone. Leng said he expected demand would grow steadily and production capacity would increase by three to five times over the next year. The start-up set a goal of raising US$20,000 on Indiegogo, a US-based crowdfunding platform, last summer, but has since raised more than US$2.8 million after going viral on social media. But delays in mass production and concerns over safety followed its crowdfunding success. The company previously said on its Douyin social media account that it would begin mass production in July. The principle behind using lasers to kill mosquitoes has been demonstrated in laboratories for years, but for a long time it remained confined to papers and prototypes. Photon Matrix Lab founder Wang Chuan said it took longer than expected to move the device into commercial production. “We originally expected to build the product in three months, but it actually took three years,” he told state broadcaster China Central Television in August. Leng said the hard part was not whether a laser could kill a mosquito, but detection accuracy, strike precision and energy balance, as well as cost and ease of manufacture. “To truly reach the consumer market, you have to get the supply chain and manufacturing process in place while ensuring performance and safety – that’s where many concepts stall,” he said. In a previous interview, he attributed the firm’s success to China’s mature local supply chains, which made it possible for grass-roots Chinese innovators to repurpose military or industrial technology, such as low-cost lidar and edge computing, for everyday consumer products.