BeeHero

Global agriculture is becoming increasingly pollinator-dependent at a time when bees are suffering from high mortality rates, weakening health, and decreasing productivity. There is a growing pollination deficit around the world, resulting in suboptimal yields and price increases for pollination services. Before BeeHero there was no method available for monitoring bee pollination activity nor data for growers to base their pollination management decisions. Pollination is now the primary limiting factor in increasing the yield of many crops at a time when demand is higher than ever. BeeHero successfully demonstrates that Precision Pollination can play a major role in ensuring sustainable global food security by offsetting the current ad-hoc approach with a data-driven solution.

Competitors in the pollination market include 3 main approaches:
1- Hive monitoring companies focus on hobbyist beekeepers and sell systems that are expensive, static, energy-intensive, and not applicable nor scalable for large-scale commercial beekeepers. Moreover, the level of insight and analytics is limited.
2. Biological treatments: companies developing biological enhancements to improve bees’ efficiency have provoked concerns about the effectiveness, safety, and long-term impact of these treatments.
3. Artificial pollination: Robotic pollinators are yet to compete with insects whose efficacy has been perfected over millions of years of evolution. Pollen is delicate, and extracting and transferring it requires perfection. Additional challenges include maintenance and logistics.

BeeHero's main revenue stream is Precision Pollination as a Service (PPaaS), which is a subscription-based model for growers. In this model, BeeHero deploys proprietary sensors into orchards and fields to collect data on bee activity, weather conditions, and other factors that impact pollination. This data is then analyzed using machine learning algorithms to provide actionable insights to growers, including recommendations for optimal crop management practices, crop yield predictions, and insights into the overall health of the ecosystem. This model allows growers to optimize crop yields, improve crop quality, and reduce the risk of crop loss due to inadequate pollination. Growers pay a service fee based on 2 metrics - the number of acres to pollinate and the preferred number of bees.

BeeHero provides complementary services to beekeepers and growers who maximize revenue by making informed data-driven pollination decisions and by reducing the risks associated with uncertain bee colony health. The beekeepers who partner with BeeHero get access to the company’s technology free of charge. In exchange, they grant BeeHero the right to act as an exclusive broker for their hives when deployed for pollination. The growers who require pollination services pay BeeHero for reliable quality assured precision pollination delivered per acre of crop (rather than a rental fee per beehive deployed on a ‘rule of thumb’ basis). BeeHero’s growing customer base is treated by a seasoned team of sales executives, many of them with farming and beekeeping backgrounds.

In less than 5 years, BeeHero became the world’s largest precision pollination provider and manages over 200K hives on 5 continents. Having started with almond pollination in the U.S., in 2023 BeeHero expanded into other crops such as blueberries, cranberries, and apples, and entered the Australian almond market. In addition to in-hive sensors, BeeHero now offers an in-field sensor system, which is most valuable for seed and specialty crops. In the upcoming years, BeeHero hopes to introduce additional business applications: Various beekeepers' premium solutions such as insurance and working capital; and bee-pollinated commodities price risk hedging solutions based on BeeHero’s unprecedented scope of data, comprised of 10 million signals recorded daily.