Israeli agricultural technology company BloomX has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round to expand its robotic pollination service across more avocado and blueberry farms in Latin America and Africa. The round was led by Elah Fund and brings BloomX’s total funding to $20 million, according to Pulse2 and Dealroom, which both reported the financing on 15 October 2026.
The company’s machines, marketed under the names Robee and Yahav 2400, imitate the brushing motion bees use to transfer pollen between flowers. BloomX sells the technology as a subscription it calls “Pollination-as-a-Service”: growers pay per hectare covered through the flowering season rather than buying hardware outright, a model closer to renting bee hives than purchasing farm equipment.
Commercial deployments already operate in Peru, Mexico, South Africa and Israel, each chosen for its large avocado or blueberry export trade. Chief executive Thai Sade said the new capital would fund an expansion into the United States, where almond and berry growers have faced rising costs for rented honeybee hives in recent years.
Bee shortages drive demand
Commercial beekeepers across several of BloomX’s target markets have reported shrinking, less reliable hive supplies, driven by disease pressure, pesticide exposure and heat stress during transport. Avocado orchards depend heavily on insect pollination to set fruit evenly across a tree; a poor pollination window during flowering can leave a significant share of blossoms unfertilised in a single season. Robotic systems are not designed to replace bees entirely, but to supplement pollination during the narrow flowering peak, when hive demand usually outstrips supply.
South Africa’s avocado belt, concentrated in Limpopo and Mpumalanga, has become one of BloomX’s fastest-growing markets for this reason. Growers there have described years when rented hives arrived late, in poor health, or in short supply during the critical flowering window. BloomX’s machines run on a fixed schedule through that period, giving orchard managers a more predictable alternative to coordinating hive logistics with beekeepers.
A narrow but growing niche
Robotic pollination remains a small corner of the broader agricultural technology market, and BloomX’s approach currently suits high-value tree and bush crops rather than staple grains, which rely mainly on wind or self-pollination. Even so, the “Pollination-as-a-Service” structure reflects a broader shift already under way in farm technology, where companies increasingly lease equipment and services instead of selling machinery outright, lowering the upfront cost for smallholders and mid-sized growers who could not otherwise afford dedicated hardware.
BloomX has not disclosed unit pricing or revenue figures, and declined to give a date for breakeven. The company said it plans to publish early results from its US pilot programme once the current blueberry season concludes, which could offer the clearest public test yet of whether robotic pollination can compete on cost with traditional hive rental at scale. The push for mechanical help in the field echoes two other agriculture stories from The Fourth Plate this week: a new zero-till seeder from Mahindra that lets farmers skip stubble burning, and a Palakkad farmer’s coconut intercropping system that takes a very different, crop-based approach to raising farm income.
