Description of proposed project

Airborne disease is a serious problem–even outside of pandemics, we lose days of our lives to flus and colds. During the pandemic, we put the burden of prevention on the individual with masks, tests, and social distancing, resulting in low compliance and significant burden on individuals. 

We believe that the built environment itself should do the work. It’s easier and more effective to convince a building owner to make a purchase decision once, rather than convincing individuals everywhere to make infection-prevention decisions continuously.

Far-UVC is one of the most promising built-environment interventions we know of for the pathogen-agnostic prevention of airborne disease. Early modeling and field studies suggest far-UVC could reduce airborne transmission rates up to an order of magnitude more effectively than the next-best intervention (portable air filters) per dollar spent, and several orders of magnitude more effectively than ventilation alone.

In April, we started Aerolamp, a company focused on producing user-friendly, low-cost, open-source far-UVC lamps. Our goal is to make far-UVC lighting affordable enough that any school, clinic, or small business can install it. Today’s $2000 fixtures limit adoption; ours currently cost $500, and potentially <$200 at scale.  We use the highest-quality components and are confident that our product will be performant for up to 5 years of daily use, with current technological developments unlocking lifetimes of 10 or 20 years of daily use. We are the most cost-effective option on the market by far.

Currently, we are selling 3D printed ‘development kit’ versions of the lamps in small volumes, lowering the barrier to access with the hope of smoothing the path to mass adoption of far-UVC. However, the plan to transition to a fully ‘productized’ version means fully updating the current version of the Aerolamp to a mass-producible version which complies with all relevant product standards. This requires significant outlay to pay for consultants and manufacturers.

Since the project is open source, you can also contribute with technical assistance. We especially need people with experience in high voltage electronics, RF, UVC, and firmware. We’re also looking for people to contribute to marketing and messaging efforts. 

Why are you qualified to work on this?

Misha has experience working sales and ops at a small hard tech company, as well as in angel investing. 

Vivian is a domain expert in far-UVC. Their day job is as a researcher at Columbia, working at one of the few existing labs specifically focused on far-UVC. They’re familiar with essentially every major element of far-UVC research and development and have been deeply immersed in the field since 2022.

Rachel is an experienced mechanical, electrical and optical engineer and cofounder of Entropic Engineering, a firm that focuses on product design and EMI compliance. This is a critical area of expertise, as far-UVC lamps are high voltage and require careful EMI engineering. Rachel is also the board chair of the OSLUV project, an R&D nonprofit dedicated to far-UVC development and adoption

Supporting Links:

You can buy a lamp or learn more at aerolamp.net

Our open-source repositories are at https://github.com/OSLUV

A detailed report on far-UVC safety and efficacy from Blueprint Biosecurity: https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/u/2025/06/Blueprint-for-Far-UVC-V1.0-6.9.25.pdf

What would you do if not funded?

We are currently self-funded with some seed capital,and profits from selling 3d-printed devkits, and have a solid runway to continue research for a while. With more funding and/or increased interest (and therefore lamp sales) we can make commitments to technical contractors and make better deals with suppliers and potential distributors. 

How much money do you need?

Final development and design on a consumer electronics product can cost into the millions, but we think we can make something mass marketable and cheap with low six figures spent on R&D and compliance testing.