With nearly half a million developer jobs empty right now, and another half million engineers soon to retire, custom software that is made on time and under budget is getting harder to find. Yet many businesses – maybe most businesses – really need it. Who’s going to fill that need? Crowdbotics, a Bee Partners portfolio … Read more
As COVID-19 drags into another year, we feel lucky that from our vantage point we see a silver lining. 2021 was a year in which we, along with much of the world, learned whether we could stand steady on the ever-shifting grounds that have become our new normal. It’s been said that “luck is where … Read more
“Doctors are very, very good at saving people’s lives. I don’t think doctors are renowned for their software engineering capabilities.” That’s how Anand Kulkarni, CEO of Bee Partners’ portfolio firm Crowdbotics describes the problem organizations face when they need custom software. “Most of the time, when people start building software, they’re starting from scratch,” he … Read more
More than 2.6 million manufacturing workers are aiming for retirement within the next decade. And that’s just one challenge American manufacturing faces. Other obstacles include the availability of cheaper labor overseas, the conundrum that even well-paying manufacturing jobs aren’t attractive to American workers, and the fact that urban centers across the U.S. – which are … Read more
Investments in robotics and automation have only accelerated during the pandemic as companies look for alternatives to “non-essential” workers and a solution for manufacturing bottlenecks. Bee portfolio company Rapid Robotics recently raised $36.7M in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global Management with participation from NEA, Greycroft and Bee Partners. The latest … Read more
Synthesis AI founder and CEO Yashar Behzadi will waste no time telling you there will be 45 billion connected cameras in the world by 2022. This is over one-and-a-half times the 27 billion cameras operating today and a 216% increase since 2017. Why does the global number of connected cameras matter to Behzadi? He knows the only … Read more
Stunning, unprecedented, chaotic…relentless. At some point, each of us at Bee Partners used those–and many other colorful–words to make sense of 2020. But, we also tested our ability to pivot quickly and effectively in order to provide the support our portfolio companies needed as we all adapted to our new reality. Perhaps surprisingly, 2020 brought a … Read more
Big congratulations to the smart thinkers at SugarCRM who have picked up Node.io. You can read the news in TechCrunch. Node’s AI-as-a-service platform augments sales, marketing, and human resources teams with machine learning-powered customer predictions and lead recommendations, enabling users to connect with better sales leads and potential customers. That’s right in SugarCRM’s sweet spot … Read more
Deeptech’s scientific and tech-innovation demands bring unique challenges for early-stage companies and their investors. Bee Partners has a long-standing interest in deeptech. We all four have a little science geek in us and we’ve witnessed through our investments the world-changing power of deeply researched and singularly applied solutions that only deeptech can provide. Our deeptech … Read more
The “robots are coming” narrative has two parallel conversations. One is a dialogue over whether or not this is a good thing. Team Bee collaborated (argued, postulated, wrote, erased, and wrote again) over several months last year to develop our core thesis, Machines Will Win on that topic. Spoiler alert: Yes, they will win, and … Read more