Episode #16 - Beewise - Saving Our Food Supply - A High Tech Solution to Bee Colony Collapse - Saar Safra, CEO/Founder of Beewise

Background / Introduction

Saar Safra, serial entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Beewise, joins Prof. Dan Isenberg to share the extraordinary mission of his sixth startup: saving the bees to secure global food supplies. With backing from Fortissimo Capital and others, and over $170 million raised, Beewise is pioneering robotic beehives to counter catastrophic bee colony collapse—a crisis affecting over 60% of colonies in the U.S. annually.

Key Themes

• Existential Agricultural Risk
• Tech-Driven Regenerative Agriculture
• Capital and Talent as Growth Bottlenecks
• Hardware-as-a-Service Business Model

Key Takeaways

• Massive Pain Point, Solved with Innovation: Traditional wooden hives (from 1850) are no match for modern threats. Beewise’s robotic hives diagnose and treat issues in real time.
• Mission Drives Culture: Employees must express genuine passion for bees to be hired. Passion and purpose are prerequisites for performance at Beewise.
• Iteration Over Perfection: Sar encourages continuous learning, embracing failure as the path to improvement—“if you don’t fail, you’re  out.”
• Biological Deadlines, Not Business Timelines: Development cycles are synced to pollination seasons. Missing a deadline means losing a year of agricultural impact.
• Scalable and Profitable Path Ahead: Despite being CapEx-heavy, each device is profitable. With more capital and talent, Beewise is poised to surpass $100M in revenue soon, on the way to a projected $500M ARR in 5 years.

Favorite Quotes

• “We saved 124 million bees last year. That’s our success metric.”
• “Our deadlines are biological, not business-driven. If you miss February, and you lose 5% of the 24 years left to fix this.”
• “You can’t save the real world with bits and bytes alone.”
• “At Beewise, if you don’t fail, you’re out.”
• “I want my name on the short list of people who turned the tide for bees.”