Laurent Laferrière is the co-founder and CEO of Ditch Labs, a tech company that’s on a mission to solve the world’s leading cause of preventable death: nicotine addiction. One of the most addictive substances known to man, nicotine which claims the lives of 8 million people worldwide each year, disproportionately affecting lower income populations.
Cigarette smoking is responsible for the deaths of more than 480,000 people in the US alone each year, and is the cause of 90% of lung cancer cases. While the health risks of smoking are widely understood, the success rates of those attempting to quit remain low, with only 5% of smokers successfully able to stop smoking on their own.
Transferring the Addiction
For those looking to quit smoking, vaping has become a popular alternative. While it’s been shown to be about twice as effective as other smoking cessation methods, and overall less harmful than smoking cigarettes, it’s far from a perfect solution. Many smokers attempt to quit by transferring the addiction to vaping, only to find it impossible to wean themselves off of the vape.
As someone who was never a cigarette smoker to begin with, Laferrière was surprised to find himself addicted to vaping, a habit that has generally been regarded as less harmful than smoking cigarettes. However, vaping has still been shown to be harmful to your health and can contribute to heart and lung disease.
A Personalized Smoking Cessation Solution
In founding Ditch Labs in 2020, Laferrière and his co-founders recognized the need to support people on their journey to quit smoking, and how this support could be the difference between success and failure.
Ditch Labs focuses on the heart of the issue: the addiction to nicotine, rather than the method through which it’s dispensed to the user. It’s Laferrière’s hope that this new technology will be the key to ending the cycle of addiction for good.
Inspired by his own struggle with vaping addiction, Laferrière and the Ditch Labs team set out to develop a personalized smoking cessation solution that leverages the power of AI to adapt to the needs of the user in real-time.
The Challenge to Secure Funding
Funding research and development within a highly regulated industry can pose a significant challenge.
Working as part of a tight-knit team of 12 people, including pharmacologists, psychologists, and engineers, Ditch Labs successfully developed their own vaporizer that dispenses nicotine in a controlled manner, gradually reducing the dosage over time to wean the user off.
However, the real value of the device is in its ability to collect and analyze user data. The insights gleaned from this data are then relayed back to the user via the mobile app, giving them a better understanding of the patterns of their addictive behavior.
After thoroughly researching this area, Laferrière found that “every individual will have a very different relationship with their illness or their addiction. What AI enables us to do is to gather a very large amount of data and get insights from that data in real time, and in a very personalized way.”
“We have about another three years of clinical validation to do to get the approvals we need from Health Canada, the FDA, and other regulatory agencies around the world to be able to commercialize our products,” Laferrière explained.
Olivier Bourbonnais (left) – Laurent Laferriere (center) – Christelle Luce, PhD (right)
How Formentera Capital Helped
“Most investors like to invest really late in a company, but the startup costs that are necessary are pretty high,” Laferrière explained, “Formentera were early investors and also early believers, investing in our pre-seed round in May 2021, back when we were a team of just four or five people.”
Formentera Capital provided Ditch Labs not only with funding, but guidance as well, making it one of the most valuable partnerships for the early-stage startup. According to Laferrière, it was this expertise along with the cash infusion that has helped Ditch Labs to get closer to achieving its mission.
“The team at Formentera, they’re all successful business people, they’ve been there, they’ve built businesses. So they know the hardships, they know how to navigate different scenarios, different opportunities.”
Looking to the Future
From where Laferrière is standing, the future looks bright.
“We were super mission-driven from the start, and now we’re realizing we can do even more with what we’ve developed. It’s hard to adapt, to adjust the mission for growth and to mobilize a team around a new, bigger, broader vision. It’s basically change management, which is maybe a challenge that we face right now.”
The team at Ditch Labs is constantly iterating to discover new ways in which the technology they’ve developed may be able to serve people in the future, beyond smoking cessation.
“We’re working on using our technology and developing our resources internally to start thinking beyond nicotine addiction. And I won’t say more for now, but it’s really exciting. We really just want to kind of revolutionize the way devices deliver drugs, and collect data and manage chronic illnesses, that’s really kind of our long term vision. So it can apply to other sectors as well.”
In their recent seed round, Ditch Labs raised $3.25 million, which will enable them to begin clinical trials, the first phase of which is set to be conducted in Europe this Fall.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
