Norselab invests in Beefutures to make bees the custodians of biodiversity

Norselab’s Meaningful Equity II fund leads an 18 MNOK Seed round investment in Beefutures to harness the power of bees as the custodians of biodiversity.

In a world where biodiversity has become a critical issue, initiatives such as the COP15 Global Biodiversity Framework are more important than ever. However, the lack of adequate tools to assess the state of biodiversity in areas is a major challenge. Beefutures' innovative technology has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the environment's resilience or susceptibility to climate incidents and human activities by generating data and insights monitoring bee behavior.

"We're excited to team up with Norselab, an investor that cares about making a positive impact, just like us," says Christophe Brod, Founder and CEO of Beefutures. "This investment will help us scale our innovative technology and further explore how bee data can help with biodiversity preservation and restoration."

Bees as biosensors

Beefutures has developed a novel technology called Onibi Watch, which uses honey bees as biosensors to evaluate how resilient or susceptible environments are to climate incidents and human activities. By monitoring bee behavior, the technology generates data that is transformed into actionable insights called Onibi Insights using AI-powered visual and audio monitoring.

To tackle the biodiversity issues, there will be an increasing demand for biodiversity data and insights to help beekeepers, farmers, property owners, municipal and national planners, and land managers to assess the health of ecosystems and make timely decisions to support pollinator-friendly agriculture and urban landscape rehabilitation.

Scaling impact

The technology developed by Beefutures is not only used to monitor and analyze the behavior of the bees and their living conditions, but also to protect honey bees from diseases and parasites like the varroa mite - which is currently decimating beehive colonies across Europe and North America - for which Beefutures has developed a non-chemical thermal treatment.Bee populations globally have been threatened by habitat loss, intensive farming practices, changes in weather patterns, excessive use of agrochemicals and invasive species. To create sustainable food systems that value biodiversity, we need a diverse and balanced mix of pollinators.

"We’re impressed by how advanced the solution is that Christophe and his team built given the early stage of the company. Beefutures’ technology has enormous potential to contribute to solving the biodiversity challenge we are facing," says Jean-Guillaume Marquaire, Investment Partner at Norselab. "We look forward to working with Beefutures to support the growth of their innovative technology and build out an early-mover solution that actively safeguards our planet’s biodiversity.

About Beefutures
Beefutures combines biotechnology, data science and 30 years of beekeeping know-how to craft game-changer tools to make a true impact on the beekeeping and pollination industries, incentivize more sustainable farming practices and combat biodiversity loss.