HiveTracks

Bees as Biosensors to Track Biodiversity

Last Funded May 2023

$128,512

raised from 117 investors

Highlights

1
Successfully closed and oversubscribed $500k pre-seed round in 2022, raising $635k.
2
20,000+ beekeeper community with 225,000+ tracked hives since 2010
3
New B2C beekeeper app to be launched in 2023
4
$250k+ in government contracts since 2021

Our Team

75% of the food we produce depends upon natural pollinators like bees. Keeping bees healthy in healthy ecosystems is essential to our planet and a key driver to making the world more resilient in the face of ever more adverse climatic events.

Pitch

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 beekeepers

    But 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 monitoring

    With 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 funds

    We 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 pollinators

        Reasons to invest

        We 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

        Overview