With the mid-point of 2022 almost upon us, the long summer days aren’t the only thing starting to heat up. Since our last newsletter, we overhauled our organizational structure as the first step in our initiative to introduce Verifli into new markets and support 24/7 self-service hive grading. We also brought on 2 new hires and additional investments last quarter to accelerate our progress as we begin to tackle a wide range of new challenges.
New hires
We strengthened our team in May with two talented full-time hires: William Still and Brittani Grimes.
William Still
Head of Growth
Having served in several senior business development roles including 6 years as CEO at a medical device startup, Will is experienced in bringing innovative products to market. In his free time, Will volunteers with Project Healing Waters, building fly fishing rods for disabled Veterans.
Brittani Grimes
Associate Project Manager
With nearly a decade of project management experience under her belt, Brittani brings a wealth of knowledge to our team. Passionate about the science of food, Brittani loves cooking, baking and experimenting with new recipes.
New funding
Capitalizing on our momentum from closing $1 million in new funding in February, we closed with two additional funds in May to oversubscribe the round, bumping our funding round total to $1.5 million. We’re thrilled to welcome our new investors: Irish Angels, an angel investing network affiliated with Notre Dame, and Innovation in Motion, a fund investing in early-stage companies in the agriculture, animal health, and human health sectors.
Optimizing for growth
We’re shifting gears this year as we aim to accelerate growth and introduce Verifli into new markets. With new Verifli users joining on and grading more and more hives each month, we saw the need to revisit our team structure in anticipation of this increased demand.
We re-organized our team under 3 core functions:
Growth: Accelerate revenue generation through customer growth and new partnerships.
R&D: Optimize Verifli accuracy and ease-of-use (improve hive strength model, mobile app and reporting dashboard).
Execution: Operate image analysis pipeline and ensure customer success.
The impact of this restructure has been encouraging so far. Execution achieved excellent turnaround time on hive strength reports for self-service customers based all over the globe, including Australia, South Africa and Spain. Growth developed more efficient lead-sourcing methods and generated new opportunities, including our first-ever hive grading contract in Kiwi pollination. R&D adapted our technology to meet the needs of our customers in new markets, ensuring Verifli delivers accurate results on hive equipment used by beekeepers around the world.
Final thoughts
These are exciting times at The Bee Corp. We’re making progress and overcoming challenges at a more rapid pace than ever before. Verifli is being used by growers, beekeepers and researchers worldwide to determine colony strength and optimize pollination. Though we’ve got plenty more challenges in front of us, it’s incredible to see our vision come to fruition.