SaaS • 03.02.2024
React NativeReact.jsLaboratories that breed, study, cross, and sell insects run some of the most data-dense operations in agritech. Every colony depends on precise climate conditions, every breeding line on accurate lineage records, every sale on real inventory. Yet the industry had no purpose-built tools — labs juggled spreadsheets, paper logs, and generic software that understood neither larvae nor lineages.
Larv set out to change that with an ERP connected directly to smart sensors throughout the lab. They came to Mara for the part that decides whether such a system gets adopted: the product design.
When no conventions exist, the first well-designed product gets to write them. There was no familiar pattern for "how breeding software should work" to copy — and no legacy habits to fight. That freedom came with responsibility: every screen we designed would become the mental model for how this industry thinks about its own data.
Mara designed the complete product experience for Larv:
Live Monitoring Dashboards — real-time readings from smart sensors across the laboratory: temperature, humidity, and environmental conditions per habitat, with deviations surfaced before they become losses.
Breeding & Research Management — lineage tracking, crossing records, and experiment data structured so researchers can trace any colony's history in seconds.
Operations & Sales — inventory, batches, and orders connected to the same live data, closing the loop from Larv to invoice.
Before designing a single screen, we had to understand a domain few designers ever touch.
Domain immersion — studying how insect labs actually operate: breeding cycles, climate sensitivity, research protocols, and what goes wrong when records fail.
Workflow mapping — following the day of a lab technician versus a researcher versus a manager, since the same data means different things to each.
Data modeling sessions — working with the Larv team to translate sensor feeds and biological hierarchies into structures an interface can carry.
We explored dashboard concepts ranging from data-maximal control rooms to minimal alert-driven views, testing where the balance lies for users who need both vigilance and focus. The chosen direction layers information: critical states are visible from across the room, detail is one click deep, and history is never more than a search away.
A colony isn't a server — "healthy" is a combination of climate, population, and lifecycle stage. We designed composite status indicators that compress these variables into one honest signal, with the underlying data always inspectable.
Lab software tempts you into scientific notation everywhere. We kept precise values for researchers but led every view with plain meaning — "humidity dropping in Habitat 4" beats a raw percentage when something needs doing now.
Larv gives insect-farming laboratories what generic software never could — a system that understands their biology. With Mara's product design, Larv gained:
Operational visibility Live sensor dashboards replacing manual checks and paper logs across the laboratory.
Research-grade records Breeding and lineage data with the structure and traceability scientific work demands.
A connected business layer Sales and inventory grounded in real-time lab reality, not yesterday's estimates.
Environmental conditions, colony statuses, and alerts — designed to be read in seconds and trusted around the clock.
Crossings, generations, and experiments — searchable, comparable, and impossible to lose.
Mara delivered the full product design for Larv's ERP — monitoring dashboards, breeding management, and sales operations — creating the interface layer for one of agritech's most unusual niches. The system enables laboratories to track every process end-to-end through connected smart sensors and purpose-built dashboards.
The smaller the market, the worse its software usually is — and the bigger the impact when someone finally designs for it properly.
Half of this project was learning entomology and lab operations. The interface only became simple because our understanding stopped being.
