TL;DR:
BeeHero brings a technological revolution to the traditional field of agriculture and pollination management. The company represents a strong and capable team with a wide background in the pollination technology field, has achieved significant growth in the last 24 months and won the trust of major clients. With a first-mover advantage and cutting-edge technology that is relevant for a wide range of crops, BeeHero is well placed to lead the growing pollination market globally.
A brief history of BeeHero
Itai Kanot grew up among his father’s farm, who is also the largest private beekeeper in the country. From a young age, he knew that his future was among the bees. As a young adult, he met high-tech expert Omar Davidi, and the two of them collaborated to find a solution to the world’s declining bee population.
Starting in 2017, with 10 hives in the backyard in Israel, their firm BeeHero now keeps track of 100,000 hives throughout the US, and has 20 employees headquartered in the US and R&D centers and research labs in Israel and Italy.
How to feed nine billion people? Bees.
A new crisis looms on the horizon. By the year 2050, nine billion people will inhabit planet earth. Feeding them sustainably and nutritiously will be one of the most wicked challenges facing humanity.
Achieving global nutritional security over the next 30 years will require agricultural production to increase by 60 per cent. This increase in production will be driven by insect-pollinated crops that have increased by over 300 per cent in the last 50 years.
About three-quarters of the world’s food crops rely on insect pollination (mainly bees). Particularly, bee pollination plays a crucial role in food production – increasing yield and quality, nutritional value, shelf life, and commercial value. Yet nearly 40 per cent of bee colonies collapse every single year.
The pollination deficit
The term “pollination crisis” highlights the global decline in pollinator abundance and diversity in large parts of the world that will critically impact the human food supply chains.
This impending emergency was also noted in the European Parliament’s resolution that stated: ‘…only bees, in sufficient numbers, can guarantee pollination…it is essential to respond without delay to the crisis in bee health in an appropriate manner with effective weapons’.
The health and effectiveness of the beehives depend on the number, spread, and strength of colonies and the timing of their introduction. However, currently, there are no data management tools or systems for farmers to base their pollination management decisions.
Enter BeeHero: A data-driven yield-enhancing technology
Founded in 2017, BeeHero is a California-based start-up aiming to optimize the way we pollinate our crops. Harnessing the power of the internet of things and machine learning, BeeHero’s platform monitors beehive activity. The breakthrough development integrates beehive data with other relevant environmental, horticultural, and agronomic data, advanced analytical modeling, and visualization techniques that, for the first time, enable the direct measurement and optimization of bee pollination input for food production.
Simply put, there are three phases to the technology that is BeeHero.
- IoT sensors are placed in beehives in order to collect data about the bee environment and activity at scale. The collected data is then integrated with other external environmental and agronomic datasets including factors ranging from weather to soil quality.
- Advanced analytical methods, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, are then used to transform the data into actionable insights for pollination management.
- These insights are visible to farmers on a user-friendly platform, providing key metrics to support management decisions with regard to pollination. It doesn’t stop there, however. In fact, BeeHero also facilitates these pollination services by partnering up with beekeepers nationwide.
Data & Main Deliverables
BeeHero delivers precision pollination services that optimize crop yield and minimize overhead.
- Strong pollination resources: that automatically monitor and report the colony health and actionable data year-round, to the farmers.
- Optimal Pollination Inputs: BeeHero’s algorithms provide accurate bee frame counts to quantify the number of bees delivered per acre of crop. And provides necessary hive status that reduces farmers’ exposure to risks from unknown hive numbers and strengths.
- Maximized Pollination Efficacy: Data-driven best practices for different crops, varieties, locations, and field sizes that optimize crop yield and quality ensure maximum crop yields.
The current success has given BeeHero the motivation to explore new applications of its technology. This includes solutions that range from the financial support of beehive leasing and the customization of insurance models all the way to creating the largest bee and pollination database that predicts different agricultural uncertainties.
Why did we invest in BeeHero?
BeeHero brings a technological revolution to the traditional field of agriculture and pollination management. The company represents a strong and capable team with a wide background in the pollination technology field, has achieved significant growth in the last 24 months and won the trust of major clients. With a first-mover advantage and cutting-edge technology that is relevant for a wide range of crops, BeeHero is well placed to lead the growing pollination market globally.
