Founded in November 2023, DP-TEC consists of three members: one expert in forest pathology and two specialists in computer science. Our team is deeply passionate about forests and acutely aware of the numerous challenges they face, including prevalent forest diseases, climate change, and detrimental human activities.
These factors have made the timber market, forest resilience, and ecosystem functionality increasingly vulnerable, with the potential for further deterioration.
Prevention is the key
DP-TEC offers two innovative products designed for disease prediction in forestry. The first product focuses on individual plant disease prediction. Customers can send us plant tissue samples for analysis, where we examine the microbiome pattern using our AI-trained model. Based on this analysis, we provide an evaluation report detailing the plant’s health status and potential infectious diseases.
Our second product, the microorganism map, integrates microorganism data with conventional mapping tools. This tool visualises the distribution of micro-organisms across plants and combines this information with pathogen characteristics and local topographic data to predict disease spread trends.
Unlike the prevalent reactive approaches in forest management, our services are proactive, aiming to enable the most effective management strategy: prevention. The use of micro-organism information in forest management is currently unexplored in the market, with existing services largely confined to remote sensing and inventory data. Our potential clients include forest companies, biotech firms, forest and agricultural sectors, nature organisations, and private forest owners or investors.
An idea on a road trip started it all
Shushu Liu and Wenzi Ren, the founders of DP-TEC, also share a close personal friendship. The concept for DP-TEC was born during a road trip in Iceland. Wenzi was discussing her reading on the application of microbiomes and artificial intelligence to the detection and prediction of human disease when she realised that these technologies could be adapted to forest science. Inspired, they pulled their car over in the Icelandic wilderness to explore the feasibility of their idea.
Later, Haoyu Wei, who is currently collaborating with NASA on a space failure prediction project, joined the team, adding exciting new perspectives to product development.
Our academic backgrounds have sometimes been a challenge for us. All our team members are from academia and initially lacked business acumen. We were unfamiliar with the ‘language’ of the industry and often felt out of place or hesitant at business networking events. However, as our start-up is still in its early stages, we’ve become increasingly confident in these settings and are actively building credibility and impact for DP-TEC.
Aiming to expand globally
We are actively participating in startup events and building industry connections to enhance our visibility. We are also in the midst of a pre-seed funding round. Securing investment at this stage would significantly boost our product development, both in terms of speed and accuracy, by allowing us to recruit people on product development.
DP-TEC will continue to focus on fundraising and model development throughout this year, with the goal of finalizing our products by next year. We have submitted an invention application to Helsinki Innovation Services, hoping that a patentable result could enhance our chances of securing funding.
Starting in 2026, we aim to broaden our reach to the agricultural market and expand our operations beyond Finland, even in Asia and America.
- For more information, follow DP-TEC on LinkedIn
- DP-TEC was one of the award winning teams in the Beyond Dead Wood hackathon earlier this year. Read more about the Hackathon.
