Tag Archives: Startup

South Korea’s agtech startup Greenlabs raises $140M Series C to accelerate global expansion

Greenlabs, a South Korean agtech startup, announced this week it has closed a $140 million Series C led by BlueRun Ventures, with participation from Skylake Incuvest and SK Square.

The startup plans to use the Series C, which brings its total raised to $170 million to date, to expedite its global expansion, make acquisitions and increase its headcount, Charlie Sanghoon Shin, co-founder and CEO of Greenlabs, told TechCrunch. Greenlabs’ pre-money valuation was around $700 million, according to a source familiar with the situation.  

Greenlabs, founded in 2017 by Scott Sungwoo Choi, Shin and Luke Donghyun Ahn, wants to digitize the entire value chain of agriculture space from crop production to distribution with a mission to address the global food supply problem in a sustainable way.

Greenlabs empowers farmers to have better control over their fresh produce and helps enterprises customers have reliable sourcing channels. The startup offers services including “Farm Morning,” an app that aggregates reliable data using AI, giving more than 500,000 farmers insight into crop lifecycle, and “Sinsun Market,” a B2B fresh produce marketplace for over 10,000 enterprise buyers, the company said. It also built smart farming software and hardware for farmers. Smart farming refers to managing farms using technologies like internet of things, robotics and artificial intelligence.

To read more click here

Dovetail raises $63M to grow its researcher-focused software business

Australian user research software company Dovetail announced today that it has closed a $63 million Series A led by Accel. The company has now raised just over $70 million in total, and it added its new capital at a valuation that it describes as “north” of $700 million.

As you can tell by the numbers, this is no ordinary Series A. Instead, it’s a late-stage investment of sorts by Accel, a venture capital firm that has a history of making large investments into technology companies that have raised little capital or self-funded until they raise, later in life, a large check.

Given that the Dovetail round is not our standard Series A fare, let’s take moment and talk through the deal, starting with the company’s early history and what’s it’s building.

Boostrapping(ish) Dovetail

TechCrunch spoke with Dovetail co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey about the capital raise, turning the clock back to the start of the company itself. Per Humphrey, after a stint in the Bay Area working for a technology company, the New Zealander joined Atlassian in Australia, where he stayed for a multi-year tenure. After that, he co-founded Dovetail without the intention of raising venture capital, instead of planning to build the company along the lines of Buffer and Basecamp, well-known technology firms that have pursued a more self-funded approach to growth.

The company’s focus on building software for the user research market might sound niche, but Dovetail found enough traction in its early days to scale to a team of six with around a half-million dollars in annual revenue under its own power. At that point, however, Humphrey said, venture investors were approaching the firm, so Dovetail raised a modest round of around AUD$5 million back in 2019.

To read more click here

Web3 ‘Proof of attendance’ startup raises $10M to mint shared memories as NFTs

If blockchains are immutable records of our digital history, what kinds of history do we want to inscribe on them? Predictably, most records thus far have been transaction data, but as entrepreneurs expand their ambitions for NFTs, startups are aiming to tie those asset transactions to real-world events and interactions.

POAP, which stands for Proof Of Attendance Protocol, wants to dial deeper into the idea of using NFT’s to create internet communities, with a protocol that helps build more active communities and award individual participation like taking part in an event. POAP is organized around badges as the visual signifier of their protocol. In the real world, a user could scan a QR code to receive an NFT memento that could unlock admission to an online community and earn them future drops.

To read more click here