It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alon. Please could you tell us about yourself?
It’s a pleasure to meet you too! Thank you for asking me to do this interview!
So my name is Alon, I am a proud dad of two and founder of PIKA, a technology company that makes reusable diapers easier to use.
To talk about my career, my whole life I’ve been working in my family business. I was managing projects. I did a degree in business management with a major in finance. After I graduated, I started working full time at Tzur, a company doing administration for hedge funds and venture capitals. This is basically how I discovered the venture capital world.
Then my daughter was born and from dealing with numbers I started dealing with diapers.
Could you please share with us the story behind the birth of your startup Pika?
Well, as I said, it started with the birth of my daughter. All my life I have tried to adopt an ecological approach, I even have a compost at home. Suddenly, from taking out the garbage once a week, I started taking it out almost daily, because of the amount of single-use diapers I was using. So I switched to reusable diapers. But every parent knows how painful and time consuming it is. Being on paternity leave, I started doing some research to find solutions that would make this whole changing diapers process much easier but also harmless to the environment.
I started this project alone, built the machine and developed the pod that is used to clean the diapers.
The whole point of PIKA is that the parents don’t need to deal with their babies’ poo.
The problem with other reusable diapers is that it takes time, you can get dirty while cleaning it. Because it touches your baby’s skin, you need to put a certain type and amount of detergent, that will clean but also won’t be harmful to your baby.
With PIKA, you can put up to 10 diapers into the machine, throw the tablet, push the button and that’s it. From the sanitization process to the temperature, everything is already calculated to clean in an effective and respectful way, both for the environment and your baby, your diapers.
Could you tell me more about the impact of using Pika re-usable and sustainable diapers?
I created PIKA, to limit the plastic waste of each baby. Every year, an estimated 258 billion diapers are being added to landfills around the world. Another crazy number is the following: disposable diapers account for 30B tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. Every time you use a reusable diaper you are making a difference to the planet. Saving energy, CO2 emissions and waste. Our diapers are the promise to end the use of plastic or chemicals against your baby’s skin. In the future, PIKA will be significantly cheaper than single use diapers.
Pika is simply effortless, economic and eco-friendly.
What are the next steps in the development of Pika? Are you looking for investors? Are you preparing to raise funds?
We already have some investors that support us and believe in our solution. We are currently looking to raise additional funds from other investors
In parallel, we are working on prototypes for the production of numerous machines to be able to develop our activity. The final goal is to start selling in Europe, the United States, and Asia. As we address a real problem faced by millions of parents on a daily basis, we manage to draw attention to ourselves. Many articles were written about our project in different magazines from all over the world.
We have a lot of demands from countries such as India, Australia, and South Africa.
In India, for instance, 97% are using reusable diapers which represents a huge opportunity for PIKA.
We are 5 people working in PIKA for now. We are currently looking to grow our team and to extend the possibilities of our product.
How do you see the future of Pika as people are increasingly aware that they need to adopt new ways of living that are more economical and sustainable?
PIKA’s goal is to turn reusable diapers into something easy that parents can easily adopt
and in a more global way, turn reusable items into something easier.
But the final goal is to convey a message to our generation, the millennials and GEN Z, that climate change is something important to us. Our goal is to restore nature, to have a big impact on the ecology and the environment.
We understand that protecting the environment is part of your daily life. What do you think about the debates on global warming, the future of our planet?
To come and tell people to change their ways of living is hard. But I'm optimistic.
In the end I think that there is a solution for a lot of things. We just need to do it in the right way with a good economic model.
An investor told me once that if we want to bring an eco-friendly product to the mass market, you need to attract villains who dont care much about the environment but will want to buy your product because it is cheaper and looks amazing. . And I couldn’t agree more to that. I wake up every morning knowing that our product is extraordinary and that we do go to people.
Thank you Alon for sharing with us the story of PIKA. We wish you the best of luck in this adventure!
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