How The Bee Corp is Empowering Growers and Beekeepers

CEO of agtech company The Bee Corp, Ellie Symes, is serious about bees. Her technology takes the uncertainty out of pollination, allowing growers to make time-sensitive decisions sooner and eliminating guesswork with objective performance metrics. In this Q & A, she shares what The Bee Corp is all about, and how it’s changing the landscape for growers.

iSelect: What does The Bee Corp do?

Ellie Symes: Growers rent beehives to pollinate about a third of the food we eat. The Bee Corp offer an infrared image analysis tool that allows them to measure their pollination contract values and make decisions that protect yield.

How did the idea for The Bee Corp come about?

When I was still in school, I started volunteering for a beekeeper. Soon after, I started a university club and was encouraged to dream bigger. Myself and my co-founder wanted to know how technology could be used to help mitigate colony loss. Over the past few years we’ve learned that loss is complicated on a commercial scale. So, we’ve edited our business model, pivoting towards what we’re doing now.

We heard a lot about the colony loss and collapse five or six years ago. Is it accelerating, or are things changing?

Overall, honeybee populations are at a ten-year high. But, there are still hive health issues, and so the prices for growers to rent have skyrocketed. Right now, even though beekeepers can split hives to maintain population to meet the demand for pollination, they must charge the growers a lot more because they’re putting a lot more inputs into their hives to keep them alive. So, you heard about colony collapse and hive decline, but the health and the resulting instability in the pollination market is the main problem.

Does The Bee Corp make bees or beekeepers more efficient?

Our technology doesn’t make bees more efficient. Instead, it allows growers to more efficiently measure and estimate the actual value of the hives that will be provided for pollination. Growers realized when costs went up that if they’re going to spend a lot more money on beehives, they want to make sure that they’re getting what they paid for. So, they started hiring manual inspectors to open the hives and estimate colony size. Our business model uses infrared image analysis to replace that manual inspection process.

It seems like a lot of today’s agtech is yield focused, cost focused, or quality focus. What would you say The Bee Corp’s focus is?

I’d say it’s cost and yield focused. If pollination doesn’t go right for growers, then nothing else they do in the growing season matters. It’s crucial to get it right. We’ve heard this from our growers, which is why they want the peace of mind of an extra inspection; not just to make sure they’re getting what they’re paid for, but to make sure they’ve got the yield.

Over the next five years, do you plan to scale the product that you have now or expand into new markets?

We want to scale to new crop markets. We launched in the almond market in California and we’ll be layering additional crop markets for the next five years and beyond. It’s been very beneficial to be laser focused on one crop market thus far, which has allowed us to build a deep understanding of the dynamics of the market through our relationships with our customers.

There are a lot of crops that need bees for pollination and a lot of markets that we can expand into, which is what we plan to do.

Did you miss The Bee Corp’s appearance on Agrifood Conversations? Watch the replay here.

Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.