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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nectar

Nectar Raises $1.1M CAD Seed Round for its IoT Beehive Monitoring Tech

Nectar, the startup that creates IoT sensors and software for more precise commercial beehive management, has raised a $1.1 million CAD (~$824,000) seed round of funding. According to Betakit, which first reported the story, “The round was led by Interdomus Capital, and saw participation from Real Ventures, Upper Canada Equity Fund, First Stone Venture Partners, Third Estate Investments, and other angel impact investors sourced through MaRS’s impact investing platform, SVX.”

Bees are vital to our food supply. As we wrote last year when we first covered Nectar:

According to the USDA, “One out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables.” But since 2006, roughly 30 percent of beehives have collapsed due to disease, pesticides and loss of habitat.

Nectar works by inserting a “Beecon” sensor into a hive, which monitors temperature, humidity, audio and movement activity. That data is beamed from the Beecon to the BeeHub station, which transmits the data to the cloud where it is analyzed by Nectar’s software. Beekeepers can then better monitor their hives to see if a new queen is hatching, if the temperature is correct, hive mortality rates and more.

Nectar isn’t the only startup catching the buzz on bee management. ApisProtect in Ireland uses IoT sensors for commercial hives as well, and BroodMinder is an open source solution for bee hobbyists.

Prior to this seed round, Nectar was a part of the Founder Fuel accelerator in Canada, which provided $100,000 (CAD). Nectar told Betakit it will use the new funding to grow its presence in North America and work with more commercial beekeepers and farmers.

So Long, Overpours. Nectar Raises $10M for Better Booze Management

If you’re a customer in a bar, a little extra Bacardi in your banana daiquiri is a good thing. If you’re the owner of that bar, however, those overpours can add up and cost you big time. This is just one facet of booze management that Nectar is aiming to solve, and as TechCrunch reports, the company just raised $10 million to help accomplish that.

Nectar is a hardware/software combo that uses specialized bottle caps outfitted with ultrasound tech for real-time pour monitoring. From the company’s FAQ:

Nectar smart caps use ultrasound to measure bottle levels in real-time. Once the bottle is poured and put back on the shelf it triggers a measurement to calculate the amount of liquor left in the bottle and exactly how much was poured out.

Nectar also offers a software only package that provides a software-based visual reference tool for bar managers to more easily count what’s left in their bottles during inventory checks.

Nectar’s visual inventory management tool

Nectar sells 20 caps plus the software for $99 a month, or there’s a 100 cap enterprise package that costs $399 a month. The software only inventory management package is $49.99 a month (if you pay annually).

While I’m being a bit snide about killing overpours (which some consider good customer service), the fact is that in the tight margin business of bars and restaurants, being able to better control your costs is important. Tools like Nectar can take what is a mundane and cumbersome task, going through your bar, bottle by bottle, and makes it more efficient and more immediate. It also builds in some accountability with staff who typically provide a little extra when their friends come in.

Additionally, insight into purchase patterns give bars the ability to see exactly what alcohols are popular and when, and create drinks and promotions to better harness that demand. Rum’s popular on a Saturday night? Pina Coladas are half off! Or, whatever, you get the drift.

Nectar isn’t the only company bringing precise controls and data to the bar industry. Pubbino makes a smart tap to keep track of beer pours, and MyWah’s Edgar is a countertop wine dispenser that pours out pinots and more at their proper temperature.

Nectar’s fundraise was led by Dragon Capital.vc, and brings the total amount raised by the company to $14.6 million. Which is something I’m sure the founders are raising glass filled with an exact amount drink to.

BroodMinder Open Sources its Beehive Sensor Data

There are plenty of companies out there making sensors that allow beekeepers to monitor their hives. What sets BroodMinder apart is that it makes all of the data generated by its users free and open to the public by default.

BroodMinder is a small, bootstrapped company that sells basic hive sensors to the beekeeping enthusiast market (read: not big commercial operations). A basic temperature sensor will cost beekeepers just $30 to get started, and uses Bluetooth to transmit data to the BroodMinder mobile app on your phone once an hour. Users can then track their hive data on the MyBroodMinder app.

If you want to gather more data from your hives, BroodMinder also sells a humidity sensor, a scale to measure hive weight ($179) and a hive HUB that will continuously collect data from your sensors and beam them up to the cloud through a cellular connection ($398 for unit + cell subscription) or WiFi ($348 for unit + premium BroodMinder subscription).

If you want to keep your data private, you’ll have to pay $75/year for a BroodMinder premium subscription. “We want a big pile of data,” said Rich Morris, “Lead Drone” at BroodMinder. “We collect that data and store it for free in the cloud, as long as you agree that it is public domain.”

All shared data is anonymous and coded only by zip code. You can see the hive data for yourself via an interactive map over at beecounted.org. Right now, BroodMinder has 1,100 users across 1,700 apiaries and 2,700 hives, and the Broodminder database just crossed 100 million data points.

So what’s going to be done with all this data? That’s a good question. Right now, BroodMinder is just collecting data, it doesn’t offer machine learning or AI to turn that data in actionable insights for beekeepers. There are, however, some groups like university researchers poring over the data to see what can learned in aggregate, especially as it relates to any insights about latitude, climate change and bee health.

That’s not to say BroodMinder won’t find ways to monetize this data. At this point, the company is just too small to develop that robust of a product roadmap. Unlike other beehive monitoring services like ApisProtect and Nectar, which target the commercial space and have taken outside money, BroodMinder is funded by Morris and staffed mostly by volunteers.

Eventually, Morris wants to take BroodMinder into the agriculture space and sell to commercial operations, but his first priority is to grow a user base, collect information and then be able to show more concrete ROI.

Hopefully his open data approach can build more buzz for BroodMinder.

Nectar Puts Sensors in Hives to Help Save the Bees

Mark Wahlberg knows it. Debbie Harry knows it. And you probably know it too. Bee populations are declining, and that is bad news.

According to the USDA, “One out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables.” But since 2006, roughly 30 percent of beehives have collapsed due to disease, pesticides and loss of habitat.

The good news, however, is that a Canadian startup called Nectar is using technology to help beekeepers better manage their colonies to help fight off this decline. The company creates sensors (also called Nectar) that go directly into beehives to monitor data such as temperature, humidity, and weight of the hive as well as the frequencies the bees emit.

Up to three sensors can be placed in a hive, depending on the type of data and how much of it you want to collect. For instance, one can be placed in the brood to monitor bee activity, or you can add more to get an overall sense of the hive and its honey production. Each sensor uses Bluetooth, which, according to the company’s lead apicultural scientist, won’t harm the bees. Readings are broadcast from the sensors to a nearby gateway every hour, and then the data is transmitted to the Cloud.

Nectar then parses through all that information and transmits it to a dashboard that keeps the beekeeper updated on the state of their bees. They can quickly learn if a new queen is hatching, whether the temperature in the hive is ideal, if there are parasites in the hive, or when the bees are about to swarm (when roughly half of the colony splits off to create a new hive).

Nectar wants to modernize beekeeping, which hasn’t changed its traditional methods for the past 100 years. Those traditional methods are manual and disruptive, with beekeepers physically opening up hives each week to check in on them, which agitates the bees and reduces their honey production. Once inside the hive, beekeepers usually rely on inaccurate, “gut” reactions to the look, sound and smell to determine its overall health.

According to Nectar co-Founder Marc-André Roberge, the result of adding his company’s sensors is farmers “Cutting down on operating cost. Losing fewer hives and raising revenue in terms of honey production and pollination contracts.”

Nectar was part of the Founder Fuel accelerator’s 2017 cohort, which gave the company $100,000 (Canadian). Nectar sensors are in pilot programs right now with commercial beekeepers, and the company aims to officially launch the first version of their product in Q1 of 2019 (when the new bee season starts). It will cost $2.50 ($1.98 USD) per month for one sensor, $4.00 ($3.17 USD) for two sensors, and $5.50 ($4.37 USD) for three sensors.

Nectar’s homepage says it can “Give your bees a voice.” Hopefully, people will listen.