We're losing 45% of all bee colonies every single year, year over year, on the planet. Today we have 36% of the bee stock we had 50 years ago. That's it. Once that's gone, it's gone. Because bees pollinate 75% of all our fruit and vegetables all around the world, we would not be able to feed 8 billion people without bee pollination. We set out on a very audacious mission of saving the bees.
All right, and so what'd you build?
Today we have the best beekeeper on the planet. Supersedes any other human beekeeper that you can imagine.
It's not human. Even if you put a thousand people around a million bees, we would not be able to tell every single bee in every single colony what's going on. The model does in milliseconds.
There's a lot of talk today about AI replacing people's jobs. This clearly replaces the beekeeper. What does the average beekeeper say about the BeeHome? There was a joke going on in the back here about honey laundering. What percentage of the honey in the United States is sold after it was honey laundered? Welcome back to another episode of Invested. I am thrilled to be here today with my old friend. Can we say that? Saar Safra, who is the founder and CEO of Beewise. We'll start with how long do we know each other?
I met you first in 1996, so I can't do the math. I'm too old for it. But 30 years.
It's incredible since you're only 40 years old, you were 10 when you pitched your first company. What company was that?
I can say the same thing about you.
It was a company called back then called Veri. We did P2P payments. P2P payments in 1996.
There are actually two P2P payments companies in Israel at the time. Back then, one was a bunch of pilots and then there was yours.
And after that you sold the company to Microsoft and spent how many years in Seattle?
Definitely overstayed my welcome. Fifteen years.
Fifteen years in Seattle, Redmond, Washington. Doing exactly what at Microsoft?
I worked there. At Microsoft, actually I worked for just a couple of years a day after my earnout. So that wasn't a long stint. And then I left and found another startup.
No, that was the first one. The second one was in the real estate business. We did resident portals for large multifamily apartment complexes. So if you lived in an apartment complex, you could pay rent online, you can meet your neighbors, you can kind of join the book club or the, you know, the biking club. And that was our software back in the heydays of SaaS.
All this is a promo to say that you did P2P payments, ad tech software for real estate, and now bees. And so explain the career transition to bees.
Actually, it makes sense, right? Ad tech, prop tech, you know, P2P payments and then bees. That's just...
Natural continuation. No, but, you know, there is a good point there to be made. And, you know, I'll take 30 seconds to just talk about that. As you grow older, right, I'm around 50.
It's not 55. Just turn the corner. So still not used to saying it. No, but point being is that as you grow older, I feel on myself, I become more dogmatic and there's a more strict criteria of how I want to apply myself, you know, on this planet. Right. So when I had this kind of in between startups transition phase, I took a year and I decided to focus not on bees per se, but on something that had real impact in the real world. In Israel. That was kind of part of my very almost strict criteria. It had to be a billion dollar business, it had to be deep technology. These are two things that I always kind of focus on. And it had to be a vertical. So when you add all these criteria, it leaves you very few spaces that you can actually operate in. Bees, or actually pollination, that would be the right kind of term, is one of those very laggard industries that are still fully manual. No technology, no industrial revolution has been here. Forget about AI, forget about robotics. So it was beautiful. It was like a shining ball that was like, oh, I have to do this because everything points me in this direction.
I mean, I have to use the phrase, how'd you get the bug about bees?
Yeah, every beekeeper you meet in your life, if you ask them, why are they in the bees business, they'll tell you, we didn't find the bees, the bees found us. And my story kind of applies in the same way. I moved to Israel and in that year I kind of helped a few startups just establish, more on the product side, that's kind of my forte, pro bono, just to get to know the ecosystem. After being away for 15 years, you're basically the only person I knew in the country beyond my family. One of these guys was a beekeeper. And he came and he said, hey, Saar, I have an idea. I'm a beekeeper. I don't even know what a product manager is. I told him, you need product. He said, I don't know what that is, but he basically said, I need help building this company. And his name is Eliyah. He's my co-founder, till this day, the smartest human being I've ever met. And I'm very fortunate to be part of his journey. And I started to help him for three months. That was kind of my window. You get three months for free. And then I move on. And we built, you know, we started there and then I fell in love with the bees. There's more to that story, but that's kind of how they found me, through Eliyah.
Did you know any beekeepers before you met Eliyah?
Okay, so you went through your life of almost 50 years and never met a beekeeper. And one guy walked in and said, hey, I need some help. And you said, sure, I'd love to help you with the bees.
He gave me a two hour pitch. But, yeah, I mean, the thing is that, you know, there's a real need and there's a real problem in our food supply industry. And bees are integral. They're in the heart of that. Which we can talk about.
Yeah. So let's take a step back. So bees have been around since the beginning of time. We think, we don't know.
Okay. And they've been pollinating the world and everything seems to be going just fine. And then all of a sudden, we needed beekeepers at some point in time.
Everything seemed to be working fine. And then we came along.
No, wait, wait, wait. Before we get to you.
Yeah, the general we. I wish it was really royal, you know, but here's the thing, right? Bees are nature's way to pollinate itself. The thing is that we tend to think of bees as a separate entity from trees or nature. They're not, we just humans. We see things as disparate and separate. But trees lure bees in with nectar. Bees are addicted to carbs, like we are, like any living organism. They like the sugar. So they're being pulled and attracted by flowers that have nectar, right? So they come in and the length of their tongue is the depth of the nectar in the flower. So they go in and they kind of swoop the nectar. But as they go in, the pollen is at the top of the flower. So the pollen, the bee is negatively charged and a flower is positively charged. So there's electrostatic attraction between the two. So the pollen sticks to the bee's hair. And when the bee moves from one flower to the other to collect nectar, that's how they pollinate. So essentially, bees are the tool for trees to pollinate themselves, because trees are static. They can't move pollen from one to the other. Right? So when you look at all these things, you basically see how a bee is a continuation of a flower, of a branch, of a tree, of nature. It's pretty crazy. And so my point is that bees were here all along. We know they've been here for over 150 million years. I'll talk about that in a minute, how we know this. And then as humans came along, we started to kind of harvest bees for our own needs. When we started kind of moving from hunter gatherers to kind of more forming agriculture. And we use the bees in the way that they're used to being used. They pollinate, they do that, and we collect the honey. Bees will produce as much honey as there is forage, right? As long as there's forage, they'll produce honey, way more than they need. Honey is the food of bees. They collect honey during the summer, so they have food during the winter. It's their own food. They produce their own honey for themselves. But they will overproduce, which is what we can take for ourselves. And that's what humans have been doing for millennia, right? But about 50 years ago, the world changed. We know this today. It's not only climate change, it's also the pesticides we started to use to really kind of grow commercial grade agriculture and produce. It's the monoculture that came in. Today you have 2 million acres of almond in California, millions of acres of avocado in the same place, which means the bees have only one source of food. Bees only eat nectar, which is their carbs, and pollen, which is the protein. If the flowers don't bloom and there's avocados instead, that doesn't help the bees. There's no food source. You need flowers. So if you have a million acres of avocado that bloom only in April, that's it. It's a desert for bees. For us, it would look wonderful, a lot of green. For the bees, it's desert 11 months throughout the year. The monoculture and all these practices essentially made it really hard on the bees.
Also, when you prune the flowers off the trees, then to get bigger fruit, which is commonly done in modern agriculture, that's bad for the bees too?
No, that happens. It's a good point. It depends when you do it. But you're right. If done right, it's after the flowers have produced the pollen that they need to pollinate. It's when they become fruit set. And you're right, that's what is being done to get better quality of fruit eventually.
So before we get into the modern bee problem. So pollination is a byproduct of the bee simply feeding itself. And that's how trees reproduce and we create fruits and more trees and all that other goodness. So when did the first beekeeper come into being? The bees were fine for a long time. They didn't need babysitters or keepers or anything like that.
But what happened is because they produce honey, and honey is something we can talk about forever, it's a high quality, very healthy product. Right? You know, you apply honey on wounds. Cancer patients eat honey because it's the only thing they can eat. Honey has special qualities. Honey is basically flower nectar. And we know that most of the medicine in the world is, beyond the chemical stuff, is from nature. Honey is the same way. And it depends which flower you take it from.
Do you eat a lot of honey?
