Startups Venture

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, Gené 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’s easy to overlook what companies outside the spotlight are contributing to startup ecosystems around the world. But that doesn’t mean their stories aren’t worth sharing.

Let’s 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. Meicai, a China-based company which connects vegetable farmers to small and medium-sized restaurants, may have raised somewhere between $600 million and $800 million in a Series F round at a valuation of $7 billion, according to reports initially surfaced by Bloomberg.

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

Other Notable Rounds

And for those of you who made it to the end, a lagniappe: an interesting paper about celestial bodies of the lunar variety and a gif of an Apollo 17 astronaut having a hard time finding his footing. We’d be over the moonmoon to know you’ll have a great weekend. ?

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

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