Bumblebee

Bumblebee is an AI pollination solution for crops in which pollination can limit crop yields, such as avocado, kiwi, almonds,

blueberries, cocoa and more. Bumblebee enables growers to increase their revenue by enlarging yields in existing crops and improving fruit quality. 

Our vision is to provide the first AI-based pollination solution that addresses each crop’s pollination needs by mimicking the natural pollination process and enhancing it using our technology.

Pollination is the natural way for plants to produce seeds, and as any natural process, it cannot be controlled.

Even when pollinators are present, natural pollination is often unpredictable as it depends on climatic factors, synchronization of male and female flowering and attraction of bees due to the presence of nectar and pollen in the flowers. Moreover, the introduction of intensive farming with its widespread use of chemicals has created challenges for crops to be properly pollinated, as natural pollinators who co-evolved with them in their original habitats are now strongly decreasing in number.

The result is that poor pollination is one of the most important causes of low yield and low quality in several fruit species, like berries, avocado, kiwifruit, almond, pistachio, hazelnut, apple, cocoa, mango and date palm, all together having a global market value of more than 115B€.

Farmers are facing both short - and long-term challenges: on one side they are striving to maintain high quality and high yield production, on the other they need to increase the production rate while pollinators are decreasing.

This is why the present and future of agriculture can't only rely on wind and insects as our pollination alternatives.

Bumblebee's mission is to help farmers increase the yield in a natural way, helping agriculture feed more people with fewer pollinators. 

To do so, we introduce Robee, the first robotic and Artificial Intelligence-based pollination solution to increase growers’ yields by mimicking the natural pollination process being done by the very same natural pollinators. The core technology we have developed to achieve this goal is a pollen extraction & releasing system based on electrostatic and vibration forces that trigger the pollen and release it from the flowers anthers with high efficiency, keeping the pollen viable in a low touch non-intrusive application. Our innovative technique allowed us to validate in-field the performance of this approach with large prospective customers. 

The initial results with the demo system were amazing, as in the first trials with avocado and blueberry crops we already demonstrated a 20% to 100% increase in production yield. Additionally, we’ve shown in the second and third field trials we’ve made on blueberry, an increase of 12% and 10%, which were on a bigger scale.

Insects, who are the natural pollinators are affecting the productivity of more than 84% of the world's crops, a market value of nearly € 600 billion in annual production (IPBES, 2016).

However, although natural pollination has worked well until the last decade, two short and long-term trends are forcing farmers to find alternative routes to keep up with the market demand: 1) the decreasing number of wild pollinators and 2) the pressure put by the society on farmers to produce more food for the growing population. Interestingly, despite these relevant drivers, the artificial pollination market is basically non-existent, which represents a huge market creating opportunity for Bumblebee.

Following our interactions with prospective customers (we are already in contact with leading players in the cocoa, avocado and blueberry industries who are showing interest in us and are waiting to try our technology and some of which funded our field trials in their site) we decided that it is crucial for us first to focus on a specific crop, validate the performance of the service in real-scale scenarios and use the success story to boost the sales in the specific market while preparing similar demos for other high value crops.

1) in the next three decades agricultural production must increase by at least 70% to feed the growing population and 2) one out of every 3 bites of food we eat is pollinated by bees and about 84% of the world’s nutritional diversity depends on insect pollination, but 3) the number of wild pollinators and bees is decreasing, so 4) something must be done to sustainably feed a human population that is quickly approaching 8 billion people.
Bumblebee's mission is to help farmers increase the yield in a natural way, helping agriculture feed more people with fewer pollinators.

Robee is the first fully autonomous robot for crop pollination, designed to help growers to efficiently perform pollination, increasing crop yield and reducing the dependency from fertilisers. 

To reach this goal, the new Robee solution is made of the following components:

An autonomous robotic platform capable of reaching any plant in the field. The platform is carrying the pollination component and sensors kit and is designed to adapt to the variability of the crop configuration. The system is designed to be fully autonomous but gives also the operator the possibility to control it remotely. The motion is controlled by an automatic path planning algorithm based on the data collected by the lidar driving system.

Pollination device - a proprietary pollen extraction mechanism, based on electrostatic forces and vibrations, to trigger the flower to release its pollen on the stigma, replicating the approach used by natural pollinators. The pollination component is able to pollinate an entire plant in a few seconds. 

An AI-based decision support system to process in-field data and provide actionable insights for farmers. The system uses data collected from the pollination process and provides the farmer with insightful information

Pollination device - a proprietary pollen extraction mechanism, based on electrostatic forces and vibrations, to trigger the flower to release its pollen on the stigma, replicating the approach used by natural pollinators. The pollination component is able to pollinate an entire plant in a few seconds. 

An AI-based decision support system to process in-field data and provide actionable insights for farmers. The system uses data collected from the pollination process and provides the farmer with insightful information

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/11zQdT4Sh2r5WI_-wTQNDdgnbk5hJlHPp

Robee is the world first autonomous robot equipped with powerful AI-algorithms able to provide farmers with a support tool for pollination, complementing the activities of natural pollinators and granting up to 100% increase of yield, at the same time reducing the amount of fertilisers.

The core technology at the basis of our innovation is our proprietary pollen extraction device, an electrostatic and mechanical vibrations approach which perfectly replicates the natural mechanism through which bees extract and release pollen. The current product is a handheld device, that must be manually approached to flowers for pollen extraction and release, which ensures 100% process effectiveness but at the expenses of speed and effectiveness, especially for large fields. 

Robee has been conceived to automate this process, implementing the pollen extraction device in a full-fledged robotic platform able to autonomously move in a crop-field, recognize flowers and the right moment for extracting/releasing pollen without any human intervention. At the same time, the continuous collection of in-field data allows Robee to understand key parameters of the crop and provide farmers with actionable insights and decision support.

In this way, Robee can operate effectively during the day for example at high and low temperatures, when other insects are not available to pollinate, ensuring farmers a payback time of less than 1 year.

Robee will be first pollinated in a high value crop (blueberry), a 5B€ market characterized by a global demand raising at double digit, and then extended to other crops as avocado, apple, other berries, kiwifruit, almond, pistachio, hazelnut, cocoa, mango and date palm, all together having a global market value of more than 115B€.

Currently, we are in the R&D and product development phase until the end of 2021.

Our goal is to help designing a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system, increasing the sustainability of farming practices, protecting the environment and preserving biodiversity, reducing the use of fertilisers in agriculture and creating more food with less land. 

The world is clearly going from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity, and with over 40% of the global lands already devoted to food production something must be done to further increase by 70% the food availability by 2050. To address this issue, “agriculture intensification” is being implemented at global scale, which turns into overuse of agrochemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) to increase and protect the yield, and allocation to more land to farming, often through deforestation. 

The detrimental effects of agriculture intensification to the environment have been largely demonstrated, which have raised concerns about the sustainability of intensive agriculture in meeting the rising demand for agricultural products. In particular, the availability of fertilisers at relatively low cost is favouring farming practices where farmers commonly apply doses far above than recommended dosage as an assurance to avoid production deficits. 

Being a young and innovative startup in an industry traditionally characterized by slow innovation cycles, we have analysed the main risks and barriers that we have to face to develop and commercialise Robee, which can be summarized in:

• Technological Risks: the core effort is turning our working “manual” demonstrator into a full-fledged autonomous robotic system seamlessly operating in the field. This means adopting a state of the art robotic platform, equipping it with an improved version of our machine vision system to detect flowers, fruits, and to detect when it is the right moment to collect and release pollen, seamlessly in all field conditions and weather. And all this should be made keeping the user experience at the highest levels. While we have the proof-of-concept of all the system components, their integration represents a significant engineering and agronomic challenge.

• Business Risks: as already said, farming is not an industry where innovation travels at a fast pace. This is due to demographic reasons, IT proficiency, reluctance to change consolidated practices, and difficulty in investing in new technologies with uncertain or long Return on Investment. 

• Internal Risks: as a startup, we are now totally focused on product development, having reached a remarkable stage of development with the limited resources we had. 

We understood that the only way to gain traction in this field is by proving to a significant number of customers that Robee provides the claimed benefit through real-world demonstrations, and then gain credibility among their peers. The next step is to structure the company so as to be able to manufacture the product in the required volumes, offer a high level service to the customers and set up the logistics, operations and after sales services needed to profitably run the business. This entails a significant investment managed in a clever way by the management team in a very short timeframe.

Risk managment table-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sH9lMKbajRn_28ZyXuIzsRx3lr63wxrX0G62GEDqjwA/edit

3 Full time, 2 part time.

Thai Elgrabli: As CEO, Thai’s experience in co-founding 2 restaurants and his entrepreneurial background from the Zell entrepreneurship program play a significant contribution to the execution skillset needed for these tasks. Thai’s academic background in sustainability (and his agricultural understanding from growing up in a Kibbutz) brings a lot of familiarity with the different stakeholders on the agriculture field.

Ido Senesh:As the VP of R&D, Ido is responsible for the entire software side of the venture. His vast experience in 8200 as both developer and team leader (ranked captain), small startups and Similarweb is crucial for Bumblebee needs to create an industry-standard infrastructure to support the entire venture.

Avi Keren: As the CTO, Avi is responsible for the device development process, including design and R&D. Avi’s 6 years experience, working in the Israeli air force as a system engineer (ranked captain) plays an important role in both creating the device, as well as applying industry practices and considerations that are related to the final commercial product we will supply.

Advisory Team-

Prof. Raffi Stern & Ph.D Gal Sapir: agronomists, domain expertise in pollination.

Vladimir Wainstein: Vladimir is a Ph.D. multidisciplinary scientist with both academic and hands-on experience in physics, with emphasis on optics and electronics. 

Gal Yardem: Gal holds a Ph.D in chemistry, he is a well known entrepreneur in the Ag-Food industry who co-founded two start-up's in his own (one of them is Beelogics sold to Monsanto in 2011 at $113M).

In 2019 and early 2020, we have tested the system in two large farms (Camposol in Peru and Hortifrut in Mexico - both funded {$50K together} the trials expenses and on board our team to launch the field trials in their site) as well as in a small-medium farms and agro-corporates in Israel (“Petel Eretz”, “Granot”, “Bananot Ha-Hof”), validating the device performances with avocado and blueberries. 

The results we have achieved are impressive, as we’ve managed to increase avocado yields by more than 100% and blueberries by more than 20% in comparison to the control in our field trials in Camposol Peru. Additionally, we’ve shown a 12% and 10% increase in blueberry yields in Hortifrut Mexico site and in Petel-Eretz trials we’ve made recently in Israel.

In addition, we  are in contact with other players who are waiting to try our technology.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sH9lMKbajRn_28ZyXuIzsRx3lr63wxrX0G62GEDqjwA/edit

We are looking for Ag/Food industry leaders who have vast business experience working upstream with large Agri corporates, who could help us sharpen the business model and to make the right integration with our assumptions to the relevant markets & industries we'll be operating in.

We are looking for Ag/Food industry leaders who have vast business experience working upstream with large Agri corporates, who could help us sharpen the business model and to make the right integration with our assumptions to the relevant markets & industries we'll be operating in.

What characterises Robee is the focus on the enhancement of the natural pollination process by mimicking the way insects are extracting and applying pollen from flowers, not harming them nor the plant and understanding when is the best timing to pollinate.

Therefore, the uniqueness of our solution is a combination of two key aspects: 

1. The versatile pollen extraction system which mimics the pollination process that is being done naturally by insects, by applying electrostatic forces and vibrations that triggers flowers to release the pollen in a non-intrusive/harmful way on the flower’s stigma.

2. AI-algorithms which allow us to predict in advance (based on humidity, temperature and the receptiveness of the flowers) what is the best timing during the day to pollinate. 

Both aspects together set up a holistic solution that gives growers the power to control the pollination process, and to use it very efficiently.