Beewise, Inc., the climate tech company behind the AI-powered BeeHome™, has officially raised a sum of $50 million in Series D financing.
According to certain reports, the stated round saw participation coming from the likes of Fortissimo Capital, Insight Partners, APG Asset Management, lool Ventures, Badiya Capital, Marav Mazon Group, and Austin Hearst, bringing the company’s total funding till date to nearly $170 million. More on that would reveal how these newly-raised funds will really go the distance to accelerate Beewise’s technological innovation, market expansion, and research.
The idea here is to strengthen its mission to save bees, and therefore, secure the global food supply.
“We are very pleased with the results of our fundraising efforts. This financing round is a testament to our business momentum and validates our position as a global leader using AI to tackle one of humanity’s most pressing issues: declined pollination due to the global collapse of bee colonies,” said Saar Safra, CEO and Co-founder of Beewise.
To understand the significance of such a development, we must take into account how three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about one-third of food crops, including many nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables, and nuts, depend on bee pollination. Having said so, bees have been dying at rates that jeopardize the global food security. For instance, 62%+ of colonies in the US died last year alone.
This reality stems, by and large, from climate change’s extreme weather, as well as monoculture-related health threats, including pesticides and pathogens, each component causing severe devastation for pollinators across the board. In case that wasn’t enough, commercial beekeepers are also not well positioned to help their colonies face these challenges.
We get to say so because apiary locations can be hundreds of miles apart, skilled labor is scarce, and a given hive receives no more than a signal visit every few weeks.
In response, Beewise would go on to develop its BeeHome™ platform, which banks upon AI and precision robotics, powered with solar energy, to offer bees “active” real-time autonomous treatment, thus taking a departure from the passive monitoring that previous generations of hive sensor technology used to offer. Markedly enough, all of the 1,240 BeeHomes currently in operation use machine learning to continuously monitor and assess hive health
In an event where beekeepers and growers want to take decisions for their hive, the BeeHome’s proprietary software conveniently makes it possible for them to take remote action from a desk or mobile device. This way they are able to protect bees from threats, and at the same time, optimize hive strength. By doing so, the technology is able to reach upon healthier colonies, improved crop yields, and enhanced biodiversity.
“Since participating in Beewise’s Series C round, we have had a front-row seat to their healthy growth and progress towards their urgent mission of saving bees at scale. What Saar and the Beewise team are building has global implications for the environment, food chain, and so much more,” said Daniel Aronovitz, Managing Director at Insight Partners.
The funding in question also builds upon several key milestones Beewise has achieved since its Series C round in 2022.
Talk about these milestones on a slightly deeper level, we begin from its successful bid drive to develop as a leading provider of pollination services globally. The company’s ecosystem is presently supported by thousands of AI-powered robotic beehives in the field,, pollinating 300K+ acres annually for hundreds of growers, including Nuveen Natural Capital (part of TIAA Investments), Agriland, Olam Food Ingredients, and more.
Next up, the company had implemented AI agents using novel models to mitigate climate risk in the agriculture market. Another detail worth a mention is in its successful attempt to prove a real-world use case of an adaptive, autonomous robot.
Joining that would be a milestone related to building a world-class AI team delivering the first-of-its-kind autonomous beekeeper model, deploying RNNs, machine learning, and reinforcing learning methods.
Rounding up highlights would be the launch of fourth generation BeeHome™, known as the BeeHome™ 4, which includes the Beewise Heat Chamber Technology, a device that eliminates 99% of lethal Varroa mites.
