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Last Week In Venture: Food Funding Frenzy, Weather Watchers, & Pitch Decks All The Way Down

Hello and welcome to Last Week In Venture, the weekly roundup of rounds you may have missed.

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This week, the Crunchbase News team was hard at work shipping the last of our quarterly reports on the state of VC in Q3 2018. If you haven’t already, check out recent full-time hire Mary Ann Azevedo’s analysis of the Texas VC market, Gen茅 Teare’s coverage of the state of funding female-founded ventures, Savannah Dowling’s reporting on the wild and woolly world of VC in China, and my attempt to briefly explain how international growth fuels the VC market today.

However, the market waits for no one, let alone a news team in the middle of a quarterly reporting cycle. As public-market investors took a serious beating, private-market investors continued funneling huge sums of money into startups like Snowflake Computing, Egnyte, G2 Crowd, and a vegetable company we’ll discuss shortly.

It鈥檚 easy to overlook what companies outside the spotlight are contributing to startup ecosystems around the world. But that doesn鈥檛 mean their stories aren鈥檛 worth sharing.

Let鈥檚 dive in!

Market Hotspot: Grocery And Food Startups

Earlier this week, we covered a preposterously large venture round raised by a vegetable delivery company, of all things. , a China-based company which connects vegetable farmers to small and medium-sized restaurants, may have raised somewhere between at a valuation of $7 billion, according to reports initially .

With this in mind, we wanted to highlight a few smaller rounds in the food sector from this past week:

  • Waste is the seamy underbelly of the food system. Untold tons of produce, protein, and dairy are tossed out every day. The fuzzy green leftovers in your fridge are just one part of the waste problem. Supermarkets throw out a lot of food too. Tel Aviv-based is betting that dynamic pricing鈥攖he practice of adjusting prices on the fly鈥攚ill help grocery stores move perishable goods off shelves faster. On Wednesday, the company announced in a round led by Dutch firm .
  • is a New York City-based company that lets fitness and health-conscious customers develop a “meal plan” that meets their caloric and macro-nutrient needs. The company in turn prepares and delivers meals to the gym, the office, or customers’ homes. This week, Kettlebell Kitchen announced it from investors including and .
  • is a San Diego-based baby and kid-friendly food company. You may have seen its squeezable pouches of pureed fruits and veggies in the aisles of your local grocery store. On Tuesday, the company announced led by .
  • , an online marketplace for specialty and artisanal foods, also raised it announced on Monday. New York City-based restaurateur led the round through his firm ; , , and participated.

Other Notable Rounds

  • In venture finance, it’s pitch decks all the way down. is collaborative presentation software for what the company calls “generation Slack.” The startup closed funding in a round co-led by and . and participated in the deal. Makes you wonder what they used to build their deck.
  • One is never really finished with “learning to code,” but is one of the places to start. It’s an immersive program for aspiring software engineers, and graduates of the program don’t pay until they land a development job making $50,000 or more. The -backed company announced on Monday. (formerly known as Google Ventures) led the deal. , , and participated in the round.
  • Madison, Wisconsin is home to , a weather data company. According to Understory鈥檚 , its patent-pending weather stations “generate the most granular weather data available.” Given recent weather events like Hurricane Michael, it’s obvious why the insurance industry is a target market for Understory, which also markets itself to utility and agricultural companies. Understory raised , according to SEC covered by .

And for those of you who made it to the end, a lagniappe: an and a . We’d be over the to know you’ll have a great weekend. ?

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by Cover photo of an eclipse is by , and the thumbnail image of a blood moon was taken by . Both photos were sourced from Unsplash.

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