There are easier things to explain at dinner than your insect factory.
Keiran Olivares Whitaker picked that conversation anyway.
He founded Entocycle, which develops technology and facilities for farming black soldier flies. The basic idea is to use insects to turn organic waste into useful products, including protein for animal feed.
Entocycle’s London demonstration facility combines computer vision, climate control, automation and data collection around a live colony.
That combination is what interests us. Biology gives you an astonishing little conversion machine. Building a business means getting it to perform consistently, in large numbers, under conditions you can afford to maintain.
The insects do not read your operating plan. They do not care that a buyer wants a delivery on Tuesday. You have to understand the process well enough to make a dependable operation around them.
That’s a properly difficult engineering problem hiding inside a story people might dismiss as weird food tech.
Our read is that Whitaker’s company sits in a useful place: the machinery and operational knowledge other insect producers need. If more people want to produce this kind of feed, someone has to make the farm work.
The economics still matter. Waste inputs, operating costs, product consistency and what a customer will actually pay are going to decide much more than a sustainability slogan.
We want to see whether Entocycle can help operators produce reliably enough to earn repeat business.
But we like a founder willing to spend years inside the unglamorous part of an unusual idea.
Some people see a room full of flies and leave.
Whitaker saw something worth engineering.
Budera Founder Files. The people building before the rest of us know what to call it.
