Hakan Atkan’s story

“I founded this business to protect the health of people and bees.”

We all know how important bees are for the environment, food production and the future of our planet and how vital it is that we protect them. This is why young entrepreneur Hakan Aktan’s business BeePlant in Turkey develops beekeeping technologies that protect bee health. Including the futuristic-sounding robot beekeepers – pollination monitoring systems for solitary bees and urban hives – which reduce bee deaths and produce healthy foods by using image processing and artificial intelligence.

Hakan started his entrepreneurial adventure in his family apiary. Although they took good care of their bees, the family was faced with significant numbers of bee deaths. When Hakan approached the problem with the mind of a computer engineer, he realised that beekeeping lagged behind agriculture and animal husbandry. Together with his team, he started his mission to protect bees and create a new and sustainable beekeeping model for the future. Adding to his green credentials, his robots work entirely using clean energy.

Hakan received support from our member in Turkey, Habitat, to grow his business. Habitat supported him with getting access to finance, such as government grants, and matched him with a mentor. Hakan’s mentor helped him develop a digital marketing strategy that enabled him to reach his target audiences. Hakan says this was hugely beneficial for his business as it would have been much harder to introduce his new products and methods to the market without this support.

With the technologies BeePlant has developed, they have already reached 600 beekeepers and helped manage more than 36 million bees. This year, they’d like to open up to the world market – Korea, in particular. BeePlant also aims to implement the studies they’re planning to do on solitary bees.

With his business BeePlant, Hakan was one of the finalists in our Green Business of the Year and Global Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2022.