Hello and welcome back to Last Week In Venture, Crunchbase News’s weekly rundown of venture deals that may have flown under your radar.

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It’s been quite the week over here. We looked at investment in Latin America (more on that later) and where women-led ventures landed big rounds (hint: it’s mostly outside the U.S., unfortunately). We examined the telehealth space, chronicled concentration in venture fund-raising (see also: the $3.6 billion fund NEA aims to raise), checked in on some unicorns, and covered supergiant VC rounds (of $100M or more) announced by Luminary, Chime, and Grab.

There are plenty of companies outside of the unicorn spotlight that are building interesting businesses and solving difficult problems. Their stories are worth sharing, too.

So, without further ado, let’s dig into some of the deals from the week that was in venture-land.

Jupiter Intelligence

Climate change is real, and the threat it poses is potentially dire. Us humans, or at least those of us fortunate enough to control our indoor climates with heat and A/C, can weather most of what a harsher outdoor climate will dish out. People without reliable access to water, food, or climate-controlled shelter today will be in an even more precarious state in the future. The natural systems we depend on may not fare so well, which means that even the most fortunate among us (and, let’s face it, if you’re reading about startups and venture capital on a Friday afternoon, that probably means you, too) are at risk. No amount of air conditioning is going to save you if all the bees die or an acidifying ocean rises to swallow up your seafront city.

Cheery stuff, right? Where there’s risk, especially one as existentially important as climate change and its consequences, there’s a market for quantifying it. Jupiter Intelligence, based in San Mateo, California, is in the business of modeling catastrophic risk outcomes and helping its customers anticipate the financial impact of different climate-change scenarios. According to the company’s website, its models “predict asset-level impact from flood, fire, heat, drought, cold, wind, and hail events at less-than-one-meter resolution.” The company says that its “[p]redictions are available from 1 hour to over 50 years in the future.” Jupiter is targeting its services at enterprises, governments, and the financial sector. Its impact models have already been used to assess the risk intense heat waves pose to power grids and helped inform public-sector infrastructure investment in coastal areas based on expected changes to tide levels and more intense storm surges, among other uses for the tech.

Jupiter Intelligence raised $23 million in a Series B round led by Energize Ventures, a Chicago-based venture firm investing in the energy sector. Prior investors––Data Collective (DCVC), which led Jupiter’s seed round and Series A lead Ignition Partners–participated in the Series B deal alongside new investors Mitsui MS&AD Ventures, Nephila Capital, QBE Ventures, and SYSTEMIQ. “The proceeds will be used to accelerate Jupiter’s aggressive expansion into new perils, geographies and resiliency services,” according to the company’s funding announcement.

The Not Co.

The CEO of Amazon mayo may not be the biggest fan of regular ol’ mayonnaise, but Mr. Bezos ventured all the way to Chile (the largest consumer of mayonnaise in the Americas) to invest in a company making a plant-based substitute for the real deal.

Based in Santiago, The Not Company makes plant-based mayonnaise, among other products which plant-based ice creams and milks. According to a recent profile of the venture in Fast Company, The Not Company expanded into Brazil “this month,” and expects “to have operations in the United States by the first quarter of 2020,” said co-founder and CEO Matias Muchnik.

Jeff Bezos’s family office participated in The Not Company’s $30 million Series A round, which was led by London-based firm The Craftory. Prior investors IndieBio and Kaszek Ventures joined in the round as well. (To read more about investments in Latin America, check out our very own Mary Ann Azevedo’s coverage of the new SoftBank fund earmarked for the region, and the follow-up piece she wrote about overall VC investment in LatAm startups.)

Other Interesting Rounds

• Did you ever want to know what something smells like just by looking at it? Hailing from Japan, Aroma Bit has developed a sensor and software that can “convert virtually any odor” into patterns which can be visualized on screen or in product labeling. Think of its sensor as a sniffer-on-a-chip, which is able to detect the presence and intensity of multiple odiferous molecules at once, mimicking the human olfactory system. Aroma Bit launched a service called “Aroma Code,” which takes measurements from the Aroma Bit sensor to produce QR code-like images the company’s mobile app can scan to surface information about the product and recommend other products with similar smell profiles. When the company launched the aroma code and app back in 2017, Aroma Bit said in a statement that, for retailers, “aroma code provides a new tool for communication and promotion that conveys the aroma of products, which embodies their uniqueness or characteristics, to consumers digitally, visually and intuitively.“ Sony Innovation Fund, the VC arm of the Japanese electronics giant, led Aroma Bit’s $2.2 million Series A round; unspecified prior investors participated in the round.
• It must be nice to have so much saved for retirement that you can afford to bet some of that capital on a high-risk high-return alternative assets. For some folks, diversifying their IRA portfolio makes sense, and for them there’s Alto IRA, a Nashville, TN-based upstart seeking to streamline the process of investing part of your IRA in alternative assets “like startups, private companies, real estate, loans, and digital currencies, either directly or through one of Alto’s investment platform partners, like AngelList.” Earlier this week, Alto announced it had raised $2.8 million in seed funding to finance customer acquisition and investment platform integration efforts. Investors in the round include Nerdwallet co-founder Jake Gibson, Foundation Capital, AVG First Check Fund, Green D Funds, Amplify.la, and Sequoia Capital’s Scout fund.

And with that, we’re done for the week! According to Google Trends, “spring is in the air” across much of America, except for the Midwest and Mountain states, which are still cold as all heck. Whether you’re breaking out the shorts and sundresses or resent needing to don a parka and dig out of yet more snow, here’s to hoping you have a great weekend!

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by JD Battles. Photo by Scott Webb, via Unsplash.