and transform society

Bee Partners seeks to work with pre-seed companies to create innovative products in the deep tech domain. The fourth fund concluded with $50 million in pledges; managing partner Michael Berolzheimer stated it was oversubscribed.

The San Francisco-based venture capital firm makes investments in businesses that are primarily concerned with robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. Berolzheimer expects more innovation to emerge from labs than ever in deep tech. So much so that, despite a slowdown in investment for the sector, Bee Partners had a 40% year-over-year rise in transaction volume, he added. Dealroom.co reports that in the second quarter of 2023, deep tech remained the second most invested category after energy.

Given the disruption and innovation emerging from that industry, he stated, “The challenge is that a lot of deep tech companies are getting funded, just not necessarily getting the funding that we think it deserves.” Deep tech is so vast that such a remark is sweeping. Though it is a little more covert, there is still a lot of action going on.

LPs of the business include family offices in the United States and a university endowment in Boston. It is one of the few pre-seed investment firms that recently closed on fresh funds, joining the likes of Garuda Ventures and Onvi Capital.

But Berolzheimer clarified to TechCrunch that Bee Partners is not like other venture capital firms, adding that his company is one of the few that is prepared to make such substantial investments at such an early stage.

“We like to say, ‘no code, no problem, no customers, no capital,'” he stated. Even if the business isn’t yet formed, we’ll invest in a team that has a fantastic idea. Just a few days after our incorporation, we are writing that first check, and we feel safe doing so. It’s pretty unusual for a founding team to be able to take home $500,000 or $1 million at once.

The partnership arrangement of Bee Partners is another distinctive feature—hence the name. Founders at Bee get to collaborate with the entire team of partners, whereas other companies usually assign one person to each portfolio business, according to Berolzheimer.

Twenty percent of Bee Partners IV’s money has already been invested in nine businesses, three using generative AI. Nova raised $2.4 million for brand integrity protection products. This year, it also co-led a seed round at Wellplace, a platform for dental practices to purchase products. It invested in Series A fermentation technology startup Pow. Bio.

The business has committed slightly over $130 million, making this its largest fund. At $43 million, its third fund was completed in 2019. Each fund that Bee Partners invests in generally comprises 25 firms over four years. It has invested as little as $350,000 and as much as $1.5 million, with an average check size of $800,000. The business claims that over 60% of portfolio firms are matriculated into Series A.

“We chose to maintain our focus at that 25-point point,” Berolzheimer stated. “It allows us to devote more time and effort to each of our businesses, which is the main reason we founded Bee Partners in the first place: to assist entrepreneurs from the ground up. We assist them with achieving product-market fit so they may go on to Series A.

A Finnish firm called Wirepas has secured money to support its innovative approach to developing an Internet of Things business. Mesh networking, as opposed to Wi-Fi or cellular networks, links millions of things. At a value that we believe to be in the range of $100 million to $200 million, the firm has raised $22 million.

Several intriguing names on the investment list allude to Wirepas’s and its technology’s strategic potential. Highland Europe is heading the round, with participation from former supporters ETF Partners, KPN Ventures (the telecom giant’s investment arm), Vito Ventures, and Vesa Laisi, as well as new sponsors Amalfi IQT (In-Q-Tel, the investment company associated with the CIA in the U.S.).

The financing follows some respectable momentum. Approximately 160 companies (“partners”) use Wirepas’ technology, and 7 million devices are linked. Currently, Australia, Germany, Finland, France, India, and the United States are among the markets it serves.

Among the clients are the NHS, which uses the technology and RFID tags to track equipment; the D4 Industry in Turkey, which follows steel coil and metal sheet supply chains; Finnish manufacturer Schaeffler, which uses the technology to track machine performance; and several energy utilities, which operate intelligent meters.

It appears that the connections that the company’s technology can make are limited to this. In short, mesh is a decentralized design that views any device or node connected to a network as an additional connection access point. In contrast to the conventional hub and spoke paradigm, a wireless network requires considerably fewer base stations to be spread out throughout an area to link devices, and it also improves node connection overall.

According to Wirepas, each of its 16 million networks can accommodate up to 4 billion devices. According to Wirepas, a spinout from Tampere University renowned for its contributions to wireless technology, their method has already been the subject of almost 100 patent applications.

One may wonder: Why and for whom would someone require this?

IoT deployments in enterprises are typically concentrated in industrial settings. In these settings, a company may utilize IoT networks to monitor continuous diagnostics in factories, distant locations, or large regions where personnel may be unable to monitor such devices continuously.

There are also more and more ways for consumers to interact with the Internet of Things: applications allow for the management and linking of connected home gadgets, and suppliers of utilities, security, and other services are also putting in connected devices in houses to raise their service standards.

Even though there are over 15 billion IoT connections, IoT providers only make a small profit. This is because, when it comes to cellular connectivity, the small amounts of extra data that machines use more than cover the costs of setting up base stations and the resources that go on them. It should be highlighted that the overall number of connected devices does not equate to the actual number of IoT nodes in operation.

According to Teppo Hemiä, CEO of Wirepas, the company’s major innovation was improving unit economics through mesh architecture, eliminating the requirement for base stations—regardless of how sophisticated they were in 5G or even 6G services.

“We used software to fix what cellular companies tried to do [in order to reduce the costs] through smaller cells,” the speaker stated. It implies that anything can be connected to this technology.

He thinks the firm has not only discovered a more effective path but has also developed a more robust business plan that modifies and enhances the economics of IoT units. To begin with, the company provides hubs, which businesses may use to construct their networks as and when they expand. As a result, both Wirepas and the client incur much lower service delivery costs. In turn, the business offers the network analytics and incoming connectivity needed to measure consumption, security, and other aspects the customer wants to keep an eye on.

“Wirepas is a technology that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, not simply a little advancement over current technologies. Wirepas addresses the two most significant obstacles to IoT adoption by providing a scalable and reasonably priced solution, according to a statement from Highland Europe partner Laurence Garrett.

To expand its autonomous flying systems for the U.S. military and its allies, Shield AI has raised an additional $200 million in funding.

Founded in 2015, the firm now has a $2.7 billion valuation. Riot Ventures and the U.S. Innovation Technology Fund (USIT), two previous Shield AI investors, co-led this most recent round. Additional investors include Snowpoint and Disruptive, two current investors, and Cathie Wood’s newly formed investment management company, ARK Invest.

The only investor in the previous $60 million fundraising round added to Shield AI’s Series E was USIT, which billionaire Thomas Tull heads. The firm has a solid track record of raising money; its Series E raised $225 million, and its Series D raised between $210 million and $300 million. This significant Series F investment is indicative of that success.

It also illustrates the capital-intensive character of defense-oriented companies, even those who, like Shield AI, claim to have systems at a lower cost than their established rivals.

The business develops technology and software to enable airplanes and drones to become autonomous systems carrying out missions in hostile conditions. Hivemind, the company’s flagship product, is A.I. pilot software that lets drones and airplanes fly on their own without the need for GPS guidance.

Additionally, Shield AI has created a drone-swarming feature called V-Bat Teams, which allows a minimum of four V-Bat drones to be controlled by a single human operator. (Martin UAV, which Shield AI purchased in 2021, produced those drones that take off and land vertically.)

The CEO and co-founder of the firm, Ryan Tseng, stated when the company unveiled V-Bat Teams earlier this month, “Our nation is faced with the difficult reality that our pilots are too few and the rules-based autonomy solutions too dumb for such swarms to exist.” “Shield AI modifies this.” Building the most excellent A.I. pilot in the world from a common A.I. foundation that can be applied to any aircraft, from quadcopters to F-16s, has been Shield AI’s main goal for the past nine years.

Additionally, the San Diego-based startup is working on Hivemind’s integration into uncrewed fighter jets and other aircraft. The Pentagon is undoubtedly drawn to Shield AI’s tech stack because of the increasingly advanced counter-drone technology, which is concentrated on blocking the drone’s communications or navigation.

In a statement, Riot Ventures co-founder and managing partner Stephen Marcus said that drone warfare is becoming more prevalent on battlefields and that the enemy is doing everything in their power to create a hostile environment, including blocking communications and GPS. “Air Force modernization is blind flying. Shield’s A.I. pilot is sophisticated enough to adjust to its surroundings without needing GPS or communications. Their AI can be trained to do a wide range of tasks; it has already piloted teams of quadcopters, V-BATs, and contemporary fighter planes. What Tesla is doing with their self-driving stack is the closest technological analog we’ve found.

The fresh money comes amid a wave of investor backing for companies in defense technology, fueled in part by increased geopolitical tensions and a keen realization by engineers and the Pentagon that the United States is in danger of lagging behind its rivals. As co-founder Brandon Tseng notably said back in 2021, comparing China’s military to Netflix and the U.S. military to Blockbuster, Shield AI executives have made some of that call.