LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- A Louisville-based business struck a deal Sunday night on the season finale of Shark Tank, the show that has entrepreneurs pitch investors on their budding businesses.
Chris Rannefors and Harrison Broadhurst presented BatBnB, which aims to help customers find a natural solution to pest control.
The product is a wooden structure that serves as a birdhouse for bats, designed to attract the insect-eating animals to homeowner’s yards.
“BatBnB is a line of designer bat houses with the idea being that the common bat will eat up to a thousand mosquito-sized insects an hour,” Rannefors said. “This makes them one of nature’s greatest forms of natural pest control. So, you put up a bat house on your house or a barn or a pole in your yard, the bats will come and roost there and while you’re sleeping the bats will eat all the bugs in your yard and when you’re out and active during the day they’re going to be sleeping."
Rannefors and Broadhurst were driven to the idea in 2016, when mosquito-borne illnesses like Zika were dominating headlines. In an effort to reduce the threat from mosquitoes in a natural way, the business partners came up with BatBnB as an alternative to pesticides.
Also driving the product development was the trouble facing bats, as White-nose Syndrome and habitat loss has caused population decline over the past decade.
During their pitch on Sunday night’s episode one investor after another declined to get involved with the business, until Kevin O’Leary--known as Mr. Wonderful--took the bait.
O’Leary said a life-long connection to bats--stemming from his family’s time living in Tunisia and Ethiopia where he would see swarms of them setting out to feed at dusk--made him sympathetic to their cause. He agreed with Rannefors and Broadhurst that bats needlessly suffered from bad PR, and decided to get involved with BatBnB to help the eco-friendly solution to home pest control grow.
Rannefors said having O’Leary on board is thrilling for its potential to help get the positive word out on bats.
“He’s got this enormous megaphone to present products to the world, and for us, yeah, building a business is important, but one of the reasons we started this company was to really get this message out there that bats are amazing animals,” Rannefors said. “We should learn to understand them, respect them and appreciate them and by doing so we can help them recover and regrow their population.”
The appearance on Shark Tank has already given BatBnB a boost in sales, which Rannefors said will help them continue to grow the business and expand their offerings of products designed to aid the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.
To learn more about BatBnB and the role bats play in our ecosystem head to www.batbnb.com.
