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Hello and welcome to Last Week In Venture, a weekly roundup of funding announcements that may have flown under your radar.

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The Crunchbase News team has been hard at work covering some of the biggest rounds of the week. Examples include a cool $200 million for ridesharing giant Grab, $80 million for graph database Neo4j, Hashicorp鈥檚 unicorn-making Series D, and other rounds raised by Monzo, Molekule, and Coinbase. On the investor side of the table, we covered big new funds from ARCH Venture Partners and True Ventures, and explained why one VC firm moved its HQ from NYC to Austin, TX. And there was so much more beyond even this.

It鈥檚 easy to miss what companies outside the spotlight are contributing to the global startup ecosystem. But that doesn鈥檛 mean their stories aren鈥檛 worth sharing.

Let鈥檚 dive into the week that was in venture-land.

The Space Street Sweeper

There’s a dark side to the . As if this planet wasn’t scary enough these days, allow us to share the following terrifying notion with you.

describes a situation where a sufficiently high density of debris in low Earth orbit causes a chain reaction of collisions which results in even smaller shards of space junk hurtling around the earth at thousands of miles an hour. So an eventual escape from this planet (or, like, just launching a satellite) could be even more fraught with risk than before.

Spooky stuff. It’s fitting then that a company like Astroscale announced it raised on Halloween. Astroscale is developing solutions to sweep space of junk. These include for satellites ready to be decommissioned, among others. That program is set to launch in 2020.

Top Of The Food Chain

Here in Last Week In Venture, we鈥檝e highlighted some interesting food deals. But most of those companies were working on food preparation and delivery. (The deal between robotic pizza-making delivery truck company and, reportedly, , would fit right into that theme.)

This week though, we wanted to focus our attention on a couple of rounds from further up the food supply chain. (If you鈥檙e sensitive to topics involving the protein industry, skip this section.)

• is a Dutch company developing a technology that can determine the biological sex of chickens before they hatch. Why does this matter? Because every year, around 3.2 billion (with a 鈥渂鈥�) male chicks are killed shortly after hatching because they don鈥檛 lay eggs and don鈥檛 produce as much meat as female birds. Being able to divert eggs that will develop into male birds before they develop could prevent at least one ethically fraught interaction between humans and animals. The company raised an unspecified amount of money from , of chemical company Evonik, and . The funding will be used to develop a prototype that can that 鈥渃an rapidly and accurately analyze and sort large quantities of eggs,鈥� according to from VisVires.
• is a food analytics company. Founded in 2014 and based in Menlo Park, CA, Clear Labs is developing a food safety testing protocol based on gene sequencing to screen for pathogens and authenticate ingredients. On Tuesday, the company announced it had raised led by . , , and also invested in the round. Clear Labs has raised $45.5 million in known venture funding to date.

Other Interesting Rounds

• , which ingests, analyzes, and visualizes the connections in complex data, raised round this week. The deal was led by (the investment arm of ), which is apparently still around). co-founder and political gadfly , co-founder , and , among others, participated in the round.
• is a company that helps fleet operators aggregate data to build simulation data and mapping solutions, with an eye on eventually enabling autonomous vehicle technology. The company raised $60 million at a $475 million valuation in led by (RBVC). , , , and others participated in the deal. DeepMap鈥檚 round fits thematically with our prior coverage of companies like Comma and Ghost Automation, which are both aggregating driving and geospatial data from users of free dashcam apps.
• And finally, proving that hype in the cryptocurrency space may be largely gone but not forgotten, there鈥檚 blockchain foundry . Perhaps most famous for making the blockchain cat-breeding and trading game CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs has in a new round of funding from some big-name investors. According to the company鈥檚 , the funding will help the Canadian company drive consumer adoption of blockchain technology, and to open a U.S. subsidiary 鈥渓ed by former executives from and Disney.鈥� (which led the round), , (formerly Google Ventures), entertainment holding company , and co-founder , among , invested in the round.

And for those of you who made it to the end, a lagniappe: a lot of stuff these days. Here’s to even when a lot is up in the air and more gets tossed at you.聽?

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