Israeli Agritech BloomX Secures $13 Million Series A to Expand AI Pollination
Israeli agritech startup BloomX has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Elah Fund. The company develops AI-driven robotic pollination systems for agriculture, increasing crop yields significantly.
Israeli agritech company BloomX, which develops advanced technological platforms for managing and optimizing pollination processes in agriculture, has announced the completion of a $13 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Elah Fund, with participation from several other investors, including Rothschild Fund, Shdot Innovation, Tene Fund, OurCrowd, BioBee, Grain Field Crops, Mishkei Hachal Aza, Kibbutz Eyal, Horeshim, Magal, Kfar Glickson, private investors, and the Israel Innovation Authority. This brings the total capital raised by the company since its inception to $20 million.
The new capital will allow BloomX to accelerate its business growth, deepen its operations in key target markets in Peru, Mexico, South Africa, and Israel, and lay the groundwork for expansion into the United States and additional Latin American countries, alongside branching out into new crops.
Founded in 2019 by Thai Sade (CEO), Avi Karen (CTO), and Ido Senesh (VP of Software Development), BloomX employs a team of 19 people, 15 of whom are based in Respon. The company operates in one of the most critical yet neglected sectors of the global food chain: pollination.
In recent decades, the demand for pollination has grown due to climate change, the decline of natural pollinators, and the expansion of agricultural land, while the number of available honeybee colonies has not kept pace. Furthermore, honeybees are not always the most suitable pollinators due to flower structure or weather conditions. To address these challenges, BloomX has developed biomimetic solutions combining advanced robotics and artificial intelligence-based algorithms, transforming pollination from a process dependent on nature into a managed and measurable agricultural input.
The company's technologies currently operate in full commercialization under a Pollination-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, granting farmers access to leading pollination tools without requiring high capital investment.
Innovative Technologies in the Field
The technologies include the Robee system, designed for blueberries, which mimics the Buzz Pollination mechanism of bumblebees by creating controlled plant vibrations that release pollen onto the stigma. Additionally, the Yahav 2400 system, launched commercially this year for avocado orchards, utilizes high-voltage electrodes to create a controlled electric field. This electric field attracts and detaches pollen grains from male flowers, and the system collects them on technological textiles mimicking the bee's body for transfer to female flowers.
BloomX technologies are already proving immense business and operational value among leading global growers, including ACP and Fruitlist (Agrovision) from Peru, Allesbeste from South Africa, and the Granot Group in Israel. They demonstrate an average yield increase of about 20% alongside significant improvements in fruit size and quality, with a rapid return on investment of up to 10.5 times for the grower. The systems allow a single operator to cover up to 35 dunams per day and operate even in extreme weather conditions where bees cannot pollinate.
Thai Sade, co-founder and CEO of BloomX, stated: "Modern agriculture has long known how to manage variables such as irrigation, fertilization, and crop protection with pinpoint precision, but pollination—a most critical link in fruit production—has remained a variable entirely at the mercy of nature. The current round is a tremendous vote of confidence in the biomimetic technology we have developed, which does not replace bees but works alongside them, granting farmers unprecedented operational and economic certainty."
Kalanit Waldper, managing partner at Elah Fund, added: "BloomX solves a real and expensive pain point for large growers with a dynamic technological solution combining robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep biological understanding. What clinched our decision to lead the round was that the systems were developed in the field, alongside agricultural customers, as a response to existing demand rather than a solution looking for a problem."
