"Looking for your next thing is like looking for love. You say you love brunettes, then you meet this redhead and fall for her."
CrazyLister was a real win — $2M ARR, VC-backed, a happy team. Vic left anyway, because he could already picture every day of his future.
Investors said: "Noble mission, but not our thesis" — there's no money in African malaria.
The company only got funded once the pitch became suburban American pest relief. The mission didn't change; the story that funded it did.
No VC wants the pitch for a company that breeds sterile male mosquitoes.
Vic skipped the grant-funded industry default and collected letters of intent from US mosquito-control districts — including Los Angeles — before raising a VC seed on proof, not projections.
"$90K is a rounding error for these players."
A single Visa/Mastercard compliance memo cut off small Gen-AI companies as a fraud risk overnight — killing his new venture's revenue in one policy change.
"A sofa is a signal that you're here to stay."
For months on Koh Samui his family sat on their suitcases, waiting to go home. Committing to furniture — to the place — is what finally made it home.
What if the deadliest animal on earth could be fought not with chemicals, but with millions of sterile versions of itself — engineered by AI and released into the wild to breed the population into collapse? Vic Levitin is a self-described builder: born in Ukraine, raised in Israel, he'd already taken CrazyLister — the "Wix for eBay" — to ~$2M ARR before burning out and going looking for something completely different. He found it in a post from two Weizmann Institute scientists "fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes," who needed a CEO — one who didn't yet know that only the females bite. That became Diptera.ai.
We go deep into the science (sex-sorting mosquitoes at the larval stage with AI, a feat long thought impossible), the problem nobody warned him about — "there's no money in this industry" — and the pivot that unlocked the round: to save lives from malaria in Africa, you first have to help rich Americans get a little less itchy. Vic explains the letters of intent from US mosquito-control districts (Los Angeles included), and why the technology is now backed by the Gates Foundation and deploying in Ethiopia.
Then, on October 7th, war broke out in Israel; nine hours later Vic and his family were on a plane to Thailand with a suitcase packed for two weeks. Two weeks became almost three years. We talk through rebuilding a life — and a new Gen-AI venture — on Koh Samui with no network and no industry, the months when no long-term decision was possible, and why, as the builder, he chooses to carry the uncertainty so his family doesn't have to.
Vic Levitin's Highlights:
→ CEO & Co-Founder of Diptera.ai — AI that sex-sorts mosquitoes at the larval stage to fight malaria via the sterile insect technique
→ ~$3M seed raised on letters of intent from US mosquito-control districts, including Los Angeles
→ Technology now backed by the Gates Foundation, deploying in Ethiopia
→ Previously founded CrazyLister, the "Wix for eBay," scaled to ~$2M ARR
→ Rebuilt from zero on Koh Samui, Thailand, growing a new Gen-AI SaaS venture to ~$90K MRR