About

The fact is that even though Apiculture stands in the center of the agro food sector, due to the importance of pollination, it currently suffers from an extreme lack of data on how bee colonies grow, how they behave in specific environments, and how this is related to the production of honey and other products. As a result, all stakeholders in the domain cannot (a) quantify the extent of existing bee losses and their causes, (b) decide on pollination policies, (c) monitor and predict the quality and quantity of honey production.
The primary source of data lies on the beekeepers. However, it is practically impossible for them to record information on site due to their cumbersome uniform and gloves. So, they resort to memory, improvised markings and handwritten notes to record information, resulting in significant delays and inefficiencies.

Solution & Product

Our solution, Beenotes™ platform comprises the following interrelated components:
A. Beehive inspector: a mobile application based on a robust voice user interface, based on the state of the art Google voice recognition tool and converting text to speech and speech to text. It supports the efficient collection of beekeeping data on-site and it interacts with the existing database offering on site information from previous hive inspections.
B. Beenotes™ database: collected data are seamlessly uploaded and synchronized to a cloud database.
C. Apiary modeling engine: The core component. It implements a state-of-the-art computational beekeeping framework and is responsible for exploiting all collected data to inform hive-specific models for honey production.
D. Beekeeper’s interface: The beekeeper has access to all collected information and modeling results via powerful visualization options providing an insightful overview of all apiaries’ state and activities.

Innovation & Scalability

Beenotes platform is the voice guided, smart digital personal assistant for data collection and analysis that supports decision making for best beekeeping practices. It resolves the existing recording problem while it introduces a data driven approach to beekeeping. Thus, the anticipated learning curve is decreased and the beekeeper’s transformation to a skilled professional with a competitive edge is drastically accelerated.
Currently, there is no affordable solution in the market, to facilitate the automatic data recording straight from all the hives. Beekeeping actions depend mainly on the beekeeper’s experience and instinct producing poor results for the majority as fact reflected on the low productivity of the domain.
The primary source of Revenues will be generated by the current platform through subscriptions. In addition, when users reach a critical mass we will have the opportunity for additional revenues through the development of new products related to consulting services based on data analytics and the use of metadata.

Traction & achievements

Since May 2020 we have attracted 400 registered users with zero marketing costs. We are now concluding the first major update/pivot to our product and we have scheduled a marketing campaign starting in January 2021, to attract a minimum of 1500 users within a period of 30 days. We are confident about our team, the problem we resolve and the scalability of our business model but we are also fully aware that the existence of revenues is the critical parameter to raise capital from investors; and we work hard for this. The paid version of our product is scheduled to commence by the end of February 2021.
Up to now we have raised capital from grants only as below:
Winner of the 2nd prize in RIS (Regional Innovation Scheme) of EIT Food (European Institute of Innovation & Technology), which took place on 9 September 2019 in HELEXPO in Thessaloniki, Greece (5,000€).
Selected in February 2020 as one of the PARSEC accelerator Open Call 100 winners, in position 42, among 370 European participant startups (10,000€). Granted Legal and Accountancy Support for RIS Entrepreneurs by EIT Food CLC South SRL (1,500€)
Selected in October 2020 as one of the 4 winners, in second position, among 12 finalist Greek startups in the agrifood accelerator Agroanelixis (13,000€).

Team & Why Us

Notis Papasouliotis (50%), is an agriculturist with expertise in Apiculture and Landscape Architect. He holds a Masters in HR Management. He has more than 15 years’ experience in managing EU projects in the domains of agriculture, public infrastructure, entrepreneurship. Notis is the initiator of the innovation, has knowledge of the honey’s value chain and maintains close contact with the beekeeping communities.
Michael Sabethai (50%), is a mathematician and entrepreneur. He started his professional career as a Computer Analyst in the Shipping Industry and soon became Manager of several small Companies in the Marine Fuels Sector. He completed his 32 year career recently as a Team Leader in a big Multinational Organization. In parallel, he showed interest in startup Technology Businesses and acted as an Angel Investor. Michael has strong communication and managerial skills and deals with business development and negotiations, as well as with financial, legal and accounting matters.
Our target market is the 4 most dynamic in beekeeping European countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, France) with 163.000 beekeepers producing 100.000 tn of honey/year, valued at 700M€. Currently, there is a 5% annual increase of the number of beekeepers entering the profession. We intend to approach them, through cooperatives, as beekeepers are mostly organized in such communities.

Funding Needs

In order to expand to the remaining 3 EU Mediterranean countries (Italy, France and Spain), which together with Greece represent the 80% of the EU bee products (honey and other), we will require €200-500Κ.