# HiveTracks Bees as Biosensors to Track Biodiversity ## Elevator pitch We monitor biodiversity by providing beekeepers with an app to keep track of the health of their bees and flora and fauna around them. As the health of bees depends upon the health of a bee hive's surroundings, we can take the temperature on biodiversity health. - Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/hivetracks - Entity ID: wefunder:company:117082 - Last updated: 2026-06-14T05:03:11Z - Generated at: 2026-06-15T01:28:01Z ## Quick facts - Successfully closed and oversubscribed $500k pre-seed round in 2022, raising $635k. - 20,000+ beekeeper community with 225,000+ tracked hives since 2010 - New B2C beekeeper app to be launched in 2023 - $250k+ in government contracts since 2021 - 1000+ app users and 4+ B2G customers ## Active fundraises - wefunder:fundraise:64575: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) - wefunder:fundraise:66406: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) ## Story HiveTracks creates data-driven innovation to solve some of the biggest problems of our time — from sustaining biodiversity to global food-stability. Today, the lack of data poses the biggest roadblock in creating lasting positive change for companies and governments willing to tackle the loss of biodiversity and improving food stability. Because how can we change what we cannot measure? Measuring biodiversity is almost impossible to do at scale because it is hardware intensive, requires manual surveys (like people in white lab coats making lists of how many beetles they saw!) and, thus, super expensive. Meanwhile, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting is starting to incorporate companies' biodiversity impact as global food chains are under pressure. There is an immense need to get biodiversity data at scale.Bees as Biosensors? Yes. Deeply connected to their ecosystems, bees are knowledgeable biosensors measuring the health of the environment and biodiversity in the 6,900+ acres (2,800+ hectares) every single bee forages. They detect environmental and climate impacts earlier than we can and behave and respond to it immediately. What if we could access their intelligence?Our Surprising Solution:Many insects are biosensors, but honey bees have a deeper relationship and interaction with humans—beekeepers—with whom they can share their valuable environmental intelligence. Beekeepers know if the bees aren’t healthy and their frequent hive inspections reveal approximately 50 data points with each record. So HiveTracks empowers both the bees and their keepers with technology-powered products to crowd-source environmental data to create a planet-positive impact.The health and behavior of bees, their rate of pollination and productivity, together with weather data and local flora, allows us to evaluate local biodiversity, climate impacts, and pollination efficiency at a ground-truthed, highly granular level. Our beekeepers around the world spin a tightly-woven community of nature experts highly sensitive to their bees' behavioral patterns. They are our companions.Our Business Model:The HiveTracks app manages and optimizes tasks for beekeepers worldwide on the basis of data-driven best practices derived from the community. We call this "community intelligence," and believe it is key because no one knows bees better than their keepers. Communitizing their experience improves bee health, promotes better beekeeping, and drives everything a beekeeper loves:✓ Increased honey harvests✓ Increased overwintering rates✓ Detecting diseases earlier✓ Learning from the community of beekeepersBut while we serve our passionate community with an essential tool, the app automates the community-sourcing of vital environmental intelligence: bee data. Knowing the health of hives locally and globally, knowing what blooms when and where, and being able to relate these patterns to other climate factors unlocks a unique data set simply impossible to unearth otherwise.Our app is available on both app stores as a SaaS subscription and is a gateway to building a sustainable community of beekeepers unlocking local environmental intelligence globally. The community-sourced biodata together with our science-led proprietary data models provide a groundbreaking way to monitor, predict and certify valuable data-driven solutions. It is possible to:✓ Monitor Biodiversity - from locally to globally (yes!)✓ Predict growth phases for pollination-dependent crops✓ Authenticate origin of honey✓ Develop at-scale environmental monitoringWith 225,000+ hives tracked to date, HiveTracks bees have covered over 1,500+ million acres (600+ million hectares) - that's more than the agricultural area of the US and more than twice the area of Europe's farmland! This proves that sourcing and monitoring environmental data from bees is scalable. The commercial applications of this are powerful:Using this "environmental intelligence," we bring to life impactful paid solutions for governments, agriculture and for organizations wishing to monitor their local biodiversity impact. To date, we have secured $250k in government contracts.The Opportunity is BIG:We are confident that HiveTracks provides a unique solution to one of the biggest and most relevant opportunities of our time, using a proprietary science-based approach that is almost impossible to copy. HiveTracks is in the booming AgriFoodTech space, which has seen investments increasing at a strong rate. The projected market for precision agriculture is $12.7 billion by 2025, and AgriFoodTech VC funding increased by 59% in 2021.Use of fundsWe plan to launch and scale our new HiveTracks app to create the biggest impact! With your funds, you become part of real change. Your equity in our company is part of humanity’s equity in our planet.To date, we have raised over $600,000 that we have invested in rebuilding our technology stack, building our new app, and creating a team that is ready to grow and scale HiveTracks.7.5% of funds raised will go towards the Wefunder intermediary fee.$1,000,000 as a growth round will help us achieve:✓ a goal of 5,000 paid B2C customers by improving mobile functionality, optimizing onboarding, and refining engagement✓ 5+ new B2B and 5+ B2G customers by launching our admin portal that seamlessly integrates with our mobile app and a one-to-many subscription✓ Critical mass and strategic density of app users to build a valuable dataset- Forward looking projections cannot be guaranteed.Your investment has an immediate impact:✓ It helps us increase the network of beekeepers that each protect and monitor biodiversity locally through their beekeeping practices and guided by our app✓ It helps governments, NGOs and organizations worldwide to measure and manage their impact on biodiversity✓ It increases beekeeper livelihoods, pollination-dependent food availability for consumers, and predictability and resiliency for farmers who rely on pollinatorsReasons to investWe have been pioneers since 2010 and are aiming to create the largest actionable biodiversity data set in the world. Bees are our sensors and beekeepers are our companions in cultivating a one-of-a-kind scalable, sustainable and impactful ecosystem of environmental data helping to drive real impact. Our clients include the German Federal Foreign Office and green financial institutions. Additionally, we work with smallholder beekeepers in Ethiopia and Uzbekistan to improve their livelihoods through better hive management practices facilitated by our app, and consumers will experience increased confidence by knowing exactly where their honey originated.Don't worry, we're not only innovative, but also smart (as in Professor-kind of smart):The heart of HiveTracks is based on our academic, data-driven research generated by our founder James Wilkes (Professor of Computer Science) and our data-science expert Joseph Cazier (Professor of Computer Information Systems) which have published in the beekeeping space for years.Join Us Today ## FAQ 1. **My initial findings show there are many companies in the bee space, which leads me to the following questions. Who are your main competitors and why? What is Hive Tracks secret sauce? IP portfolio? When will the Form C be available? 5-year plan? Exit strategy?** - Thanks a lot for your question, Curtis. Let's start by talking about the bee space: Several companies/individuals offer B2C hobbyist apps that provide the functionality of recording notes about hive conditions and management actions for individual, small-scale beekeepers. BeePlus and HiveKeepers are two examples of those. In addition, there are non-profit organizations with similar offerings, namely Hivelog and Beep. We would categorize all of these applications as passive data collection sys... ## Team - Max Rünzel (CEO & Co-Founder) - James Wilkes (Founder and CBO) - Laura Dye (COO & Co-Founder) - John Cornett (CTO) ## Recent posts - The Final Countdown is on (2023-04-28T21:44:43Z) - Happy Earth Day! (2023-04-22T19:07:57Z) - Podcast Time & App Update (2023-04-05T15:17:38Z) - HiveTracks on KingsCrowd (2023-04-04T14:24:19Z) - We did it! (2023-03-23T11:30:54Z) - Podcast time! (2023-03-08T12:59:50Z) - Tomorrow is the big day! (2023-02-24T02:29:31Z) - Another update from one of our investors (2023-02-15T13:45:27Z) - Continuing our investor interviews (2023-02-08T15:21:18Z) - Here's what our investors have to say (2022-11-15T13:32:32Z) ## Q&A - Q: My initial findings show there are many companies in the bee space, which leads me to the following questions. Who are your main competitors and why? What is Hive Tracks secret sauce? IP portfolio? When will the Form C be available? 5-year plan? Exit strategy? - A: Thanks a lot for your question, Curtis. Let's start by talking about the bee space: Several companies/individuals offer B2C hobbyist apps that provide the functionality of recording notes about hive conditions and management actions for individual, small-scale beekeepers. BeePlus and HiveKeepers are two examples of those. In addition, there are non-profit organizations with similar offerings, namely Hivelog and Beep. We would categorize all of these applications as passive data collection systems that limit the usefulness of the data to the individual beekeeper. HiveTracks differentiates itself from competitors in significant ways that are difficult to duplicate: 1. Legacy and depth of database - HiveTracks was the first to market in 2010 and is recognized in the beekeeping software space with a strong, well-established brand reputation and an organically generated, globally distributed user community. 2. Community intelligence & recommendation engine - We take a passive record-keeping tool and turn it into a dynamic ecosystem that sends tailored data-, location-, weather-, beekeeper- and environment-based notifications to our users while collecting key bee data that improves outcomes of the entire beekeeping community. 3. Design and branding - Our new UX and UI are based on years of experience. Our new beekeeper-centered design is a clear distinction from our competitors and brings an intuitive, simple, and beautiful design to our users. 4. Our app is designed to be a component in a larger data ecosystem that we are creating. We use weather and blooming data to enrich recommendations for beekeepers. Their interactions then create data that allows us to validate their honey's origin and the impact of the ecosystem services they deliver to improve biodiversity locally. In doing so, our app becomes a one-stop shop for beekeepers to improve their hives' health and livelihoods. Currently, nobody tracks pollination ecosystem services at scale outside of the purely agricultural setting. 5. Our mobile app neatly integrates with a data-driven web portal which allows groups of beekeepers (commercial operators, beekeeping service providers, beekeeping clubs, apiary extension services, apiary inspectors, mentors, or any collection of beekeepers) to handle their beekeeping practices at scale with maps, messaging, data analysis, and reporting. Let's now dive into our 5-year plan: Our plan is to demonstrate the viability of sustainable business models built on the value of crowd-sourced environmental data that recognizes and justly balances the interests of the crowd data collectors, data consumers, good data privacy policies, and planet-positive outcomes. We are creating a platform in the beekeeping sector that financially remunerates beekeepers for keeping healthy bees and collecting the associated data that fuels biodiversity monitoring and protection, pollination validation, and honey authentication. In addition, the platform creates opportunities for beekeepers to reach better markets for their honey and to access financial services for expanding and insuring their businesses. We are positioned well to bring value to existing bee technology companies as well as look to work with strategic acquisition partners in the re-insurance and AgTech space to expand into the financial services and product authentication markets. As for the IP portfolio: We have no patents yet. We are a software company as opposed to the hardware-focused bee technology companies where patents make more sense. Our stance has been to operate from a trade secret and copyright IP position until such time as the software becomes sophisticated enough to warrant patent protections. We have just crossed that threshold and are in the process of filing provisional patents. Finally, you can download form C on the check-out page that you'll see when you click on the invest button before confirmation your investment. Thanks again for your questions, Curtis. Also, I would love to jump on a call to talk more if that works for you. - Q: I would like to set up some hive locations, we would like to get in to your program. I realize its importance. Hope to get started soon. Keep up the good work. How can we help you?