#StartupsEverywhere: Omer Davidi, CEO and Co-Founder, BeeHero
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Using Smart Hives to Monitor the Health of Bees
Fresno-based startup BeeHero uses sensors and machine learning to monitor the health of beehives and help farmers maximize their crop yields by tracking the pollination process. We spoke with BeeHero CEO and Co-Founder Omer Davidi to learn more about his startup’s work, how the pandemic has upended the farming industry, and why it’s important for policymakers to provide access to the capital startups need to reach consumers and hone their products.
What in your background made you interested in launching BeeHero?
I’ve always been fascinated with how technology can improve different fields. I myself have a background in cybersecurity, and prior to founding BeeHero, I’ve worked on interesting projects related to cyberspace and technology. About three years ago I met one of my co-founders, Itai Kanot, a second-generation commercial beekeeper. I heard a lot about how bees are dying and how humanity can’t survive without them, but I didn’t understand why there wasn’t more innovative technology in this space. One thing led to another, and soon enough we started placing sensors into hives. That was our start, and now we’re trying to figure out how to bring even more innovation —especially when there’s such a clear problem.
Tell us a bit about BeeHero and the work that you’re doing. How does your technology help maximize precision pollination?
When people think of bees, the first, natural thing they think of is honey. But pollination is so much more important. When you’re seeing huge losses of colonies around the world—and the average colony is only producing 50 or 60 percent of its potential— it further reduces the effectiveness of pollination. If you have 10,000 hives that need to pollinate 10,000 acres of specific crops, and each crop has different efficiency levels and time expectations, then you need to determine how long it will take to pollinate your fields. If you have data on every single hive that’s going to be used for pollination, then you know how each hive should be used and where it should be deployed to precisely optimize the pollination process.
What we’ve developed is a very low-cost, off-the-shelf sensor platform that beekeepers can install in the middle frame of the colony-- the heart of the colony and where the queen bee is located. We use this to monitor the health of the hives, as well as the other surrounding hives. Using these sensors, we can detect and predict different scenarios, good and bad, that affect the colonies and alert beekeepers and growers with real-time, actionable insights about the health and efficiency of each hive.
There is often a 40-45 percent mortality rate among bee colonies, and we often hear how pesticides and environmental changes impact colonies. The majority of colonies, however, do not collapse because of these issues, but rather because of a combination of other factors: a lack of food sources, a viral disease, or the death of the queen. Using our technology, we’ve been able to map different patterns of stress inside the colonies to predict and determine some of these failures, so a beekeeper can identify, for example, if the bees aren’t behaving as expected. Normally, beekeepers need to spend a lot of time and a lot of resources to check every hive. Our technology alleviates much of that physical labor.
How has BeeHero been affected by the coronavirus pandemic?
COVID has made everything more complicated because people are less willing to meet with anyone they haven’t met yet. Our work is very hands-on and person-to-person. We want to show that our technology works and can make a difference. The faster we can meet and engage with farmers, the faster we can get our products onto their farms. For us, I can say that even the lack of conferences—especially in an industry where Zoom calls are not very natural—makes it much more difficult to engage with farmers.
The pandemic has also affected a lot of farmers across the country. We’ve gotten calls from apple growers in Washington state asking us if we have hives to provide them with because the beekeepers they usually work with don’t want to travel. Right now, the government is trying to push for continued innovation in our sector. But shortening the path for engagement—particularly when it comes to our work and engaging with farmers—for those who would benefit from specific services would be very helpful. It’s difficult for startups in specific industries, like ours, to create awareness about their products in a digital-only setting. So more work needs to be done to address those continuing challenges when it comes to innovating and growing in this new normal.
What are some of the policy steps that local, state, and federal lawmakers can take to further support startups like BeeHero?
One of the challenges startups face when trying to introduce new technologies into less advanced or evolving industries is the time it takes to build credibility with potential users and make them comfortable investing money in that technology. It’s important that every startup founder spend as much time as possible with their customers to learn about their real needs, pains, and concerns. And policymakers need to ensure that entrepreneurs have access to the capital needed to work through this process.
One thing I’ve seen from working in the startup industry is not to oversell your product, which can be hard, especially in the farming industry, to prove the impact of your work. The power of Internet of Things devices, like our sensors, is that we can get and show data that helps make decisions. For some industries, pushing new and unproven technologies can discredit others trying to enter the market. It’s a delicate balance.
What is your goal for BeeHero moving forward?
When we started the company three years ago, our main goal was to research and prove that technology can make a real difference when it comes to bee health and welfare, hive strength, and pollination quality. So we worked closely with beekeepers to make sure that we could actually reduce mortality rates while also reducing operational costs. But that experience alone didn’t foreshadow all of the mechanics you need to learn and engage within the broader startup industry. One important thing is accessing additional capital so you can grow to make your impact. Over the past seven months, we’ve worked on getting more investors involved with BeeHero, and have also focused more on ways that we can better support farmers. We’re mainly focused on almonds as the main industry that needs our support.
There are many other industries and crops that we’re continuing to look into where we believe we’ll have a positive impact—such as canola, which is a self-pollinating crop but benefits from bee pollination. We’ve also had very successful experiments with soybean fertilization, which is a crop that did not previously use pollinator bees. We’re also expanding outside of California to other states, countries, and regions, including Australia and South America.
Ultimately, we want to be in a position where BeeHero becomes the pollination services company that farmers all around the world use to benefit from the tangible offer of precision pollination that leads to higher crop yields, lowers operational costs, and helps lower bee mortality rate.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email edward@engine.is.
