Startup says the seaweed blobbing toward Florida has a silver lining

A brown macroalgae native to the Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea is increasingly a menace to coastal ecosystems and communities across the Gulf of Mexico, ever since mats of the normally beneficial seaweed (known as sargassum) exploded in numbers in 2011. This is the backdrop for Carbonwave, which recently raised $5 million to put the hulking algae blooms to good use.

Researchers say farm and sewage runoff is likely driving the now 5,000-mile-wide “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.” Climate change may also be playing a role.

There’s no need to run screaming from sargassum, despite the tone of some stories covering the Florida-bound blooms. Still, they pose a threat to coral reefs and tourism-dependent livelihoods alike. When the stuff piles up on beaches, it rots, emitting skunky hydrogen sulfide. 

The recent sargassum surges are forcing folks to find creative ways to get rid of it, and already, possible applications run the gamut. Researchers and entrepreneurs aim to turn it into syrup, bricks and even jet fuel. As for Carbonwave, the Boston- and Puerto Rico–based startup is using it in fertilizer, cosmetics and even faux leather.

Backed by ESG-themed investment firms Natixis and Viridios Capital, as well as ocean-focused VC Katapult, Carbonwave says the new cash will help it scale production of its seaweed-based emulsifier for cosmetics. The startup said in a statement that it “has already sold half a ton” of its emulsifier, which it created as an alternative to petroleum-based ingredients. The company also claimed that its sargassum fertilizer “reduces the need of” climate change-driving nitrogen fertilizer.

CEO Geoff Chapin said Carbonwave makes these products through a “proprietary extraction process,” which involves pressing the seaweed and removing the arsenic. The process yields a liquid fertilizer, while the leftover pulp forms the basis for the emulsifier and fake leather. The way Chapin tells it, the company uses “almost every part of the seaweed to make these products.”

Carbonwave is part of a wave of startups vying to turn algae into environmentally friendlier products. For starters, there’s H&M-backed Algiknit (now Keel Labs), which creates textiles; a slew of bioplastics companies, including Loliware and ULUU; and a firm called Umaro, which makes sea-bacon. Seaweed startups often focus on commercializing kelp in one way or another, but a few (like Carbonwave and Seaweed Generation) focus on sargassum.

“We need to put it to good use before it creates more ecological and climate harm,” Carbonwave told TechCrunch. 

The startup added that it may up its $5 million Series A with additional funding later on. It has secured at least $12 million to date.

Startup says the seaweed blobbing toward Florida has a silver lining by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York

Around 39,000 people were killed in motor vehicle incidents in the USA in 2020 — and 6,200 of those deaths were pedestrians. Needless to say, those deaths aren’t just statistics: each has a ripple effect on families, loved ones and the wider communities. Viva is looking to tackle transportation impacts after raising $8.5 million in funding to expand its transport data collection into North America, with the long-term hope to reduce the number of injuries and make traffic safer overall. 

Viva (or VivaCity as it is known in the U.K.) is already well-established in Australia and the U.K. and is now bringing its artificial intelligence sensors to New York City. It will work with the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DoT) on a new safety data analysis project. Viva’s sensors gather anonymized data showing how different street users move (or don’t) through the city. They can monitor how many vehicles or people are traveling in which direction, where and when congestion occurs and even detect “near misses” between vehicles or vehicles and pedestrians.

This wealth of anonymized data is intended to assist NYC DoT in making strategic decisions that help people move from A to B more efficiently, more sustainably and more safely. The theory is that if you can predict where accidents are likely to occur, taking action to prevent them beats waiting for one — or more — to happen before trying to do something about it. 

“There is a critical need for technology that adapts to the changing mobility landscape. Reactive decision-making is not fit for purpose and it is costing lives. To change, we need to have data to better understand how people are using the roads,” Viva’s CEO Mark Nicholson explains. “This helps authorities to redirect their billions of annual infrastructure investment into the right places.”

“The main driver for both myself and my co-founders is to tackle climate change. It’s the sad truth that globally, transport is the most stubborn when it comes to emissions — even with electric vehicles coming in,” says Nicholson. In a nutshell, poor transport infrastructure is a people-killer in more ways than one. “Making our streets safer means more people can go places on foot or by two-wheeled pedal-power. Good for people, good for the planet.” 

“I’m excited to see the impact this will have on road safety, particularly for vulnerable road users like cyclists. The perception that the roads are dangerous is the No. 1 reason that people don’t cycle more, so anything we can do to change that will have a huge climate impact,” says Nicholson.

Nicholson and his co-founders met at university in 2011, when they raised half a million dollars to build an experimental car that was 50x more efficient than standard road vehicles. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, they founded Viva in 2015, looking to improve road safety and fight climate collapse.

Since its foundation, Viva has deployed more than 3,500 sensors in seven countries. These sensors can detect nine different modes of transport and have accumulated an impressive 20 billion road user counts. Its latest funding aims to help it grow further.

Viva’s latest funding is led by sustainable infrastructure VC investor EnBW New Ventures (ENV), sustainability-led alternative assets and SME investment manager Foresight Group and Gresham House Ventures, the growth equity arm of specialist alternative asset manager Gresham House. Using this fundraising, Viva says it is focused on continued growth, with two particular goals: 

First is its internal expansion, of which the New York City collaboration is a part. “We’re already present in over 100 U.K. cities and have worked with authorities in Australia and around Europe to better understand their roads,” says Nicholson. “With our sensors installed in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, NYC DoT are now analyzing this data to prioritize projects for the areas most in need of safety and other improvements.”

The second goal is to expand the Viva product line.  “Our vision is for road transport infrastructure to become data-driven, including real-time systems like traffic signals. The new product portfolio has targeted products that address the three major challenges the industry faces: road safety, sustainable transport and network optimization to beat congestion,” Nicholson concludes. 

Nicholson is in no doubt of how valuable the data collected by Viva can be to creating livable cities. “If we look back 10-20 years, other industries have been revolutionized by data, including advertising, marketing and retail. These industries are now radically different because of data that has gone into their ecosystems.”

The collation of large-scale anonymized data will allow for the analysis of how a city’s roads function: how and when people move about, and where the bottlenecks and blackspots are. Ultimately, this can lead to safer streets and livable cities where citizens aren’t afraid to engage with active travel. 

You might have noticed how there’s an emphasis on “anonymized data” here — the company tells TechCrunch that privacy-by-design is fundamental to the company, and it claims that maintaining the security and confidentiality of people’s data is critical to the company’s success.

“I believe strongly that the future of the Smart City has to be citizen-centric,” says Nicholson. “As such, we have designed our solutions from the ground up to guarantee the privacy of every citizen. The system was developed using data protection-by-design principles and is fully compliant with GDPR.”

VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US

Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin.

Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt place its shipping containers steps away from such customers as restaurants and grocery stores, without having to pay the astronomical rent of a commercial or industrial space in a downtown area.

Adapt opened its first shipping container in Austin and began deliveries to restaurants this week. Over the course of the next few years, the startup plans to expand to over 50 locations, including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami.

“Our model is to create hyper-local farms in densely populated urban areas to reduce the distance from farm to fork,” Jonathan Murray, Adapt AgTech’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch.

Adapt’s network of shipping container farms specializes in “aberrant gourmet mushrooms,” which are gourmet mushrooms that haven’t been available in North American retail until very recently. Think pink, yellow, blue and king oysters, chestnut mushrooms, and the trending lion’s mane.

“Mushrooms cater very, very well to container farming versus other crops like leafy greens because of the energy consumption,” continued Murray. “They don’t require a tremendous amount of light. It’s really just temperature and humidity.”

Adapt, which launched in February 2022, delivered its first farm in June last year to a location in Toronto. The company has been growing ever since and now has farms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Kingston and Austin. On February 17, Adapt says it will launch a partnership with Loblaws — Canada’s largest retailer — starting with two flagship stores in downtown Toronto, and then dozens more in Toronto and Ottawa before expanding elsewhere over the following months.

Adapt will also roll out with retail banners under Canadian grocery chains Sobeys and Pattison Food Group in 2023.

“By the end of 2023 we’ll be available in stores of at least three of the top five largest retailers in Canada from Halifax to Vancouver and in between, which combined represent over 3,500 stores,” said Murray.

Adapt recently closed a seed round with climate VC Congruent, and it will use the funds to expand its base and hire more support.

Sustainable fruiting, cheaper mushrooms

Adapt AgTech designs and manufactures its shipping containers in Delta, British Columbia. Aside from the five containers operating today, Adapt recently started production on 16 more units and is aiming to deploy over 25 units over the next 12 months. Some of Adapt’s shipping containers are solar-powered with backup plugs, but for the purposes of a speedy U.S. launch, the startup will plug its shipping containers into the grid. The energy consumption, Murray said, is low — about 10 kilowatt hours per day.

The company’s distribution model is akin to a hub and spoke. Adapt uses a centralized hub in Kingston, Ontario, to do all of the lab work and colonize the substrate blocks — meaning it allows the mycelium, the root structure of the fungus, to grow on blocks of sawdust, spent coffee grounds or coconut coir. The startup then sends out the blocks to shipping containers, where the mushrooms can fruit close to customers. Murray says this allows Adapt to deliver mushrooms within a couple of hours of harvest, which not only means fresher fungi, but also longer-lasting mushrooms and reduced spoilage.

The startup deploys and operates the containers and also fulfills orders. An operator oversees everything from harvesting to managing orders to delivering mushrooms.

“All of our containers are currently operating essentially on one full-time farmer, so we’re enabling them to become what we like to call ‘farmtrepreneurs,'” said Murray. “So uncapped commissions, grow your territory as big as you can. We’ll add containers, we’ll grow your territories. This allows us to bring new and young people into farming as well, which is exciting.”

Murray also noted that existing mushroom farm operators have reached out to Adapt to flip their at-home businesses into Adapt farms.

The whole process allows the startup to stay vertically integrated, and thus save money on materials like substrate, which Adapt makes itself out of whatever is locally available. Adapt’s control over each farm also lets the company keep tabs on well-fruiting mushroom strains and propagate more of them, delivering even healthier margins to the company and a high-quality product that’s cheaper than what you’d get at the farmer’s market, said Murray.

From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Danish startup Kanpla wants to help canteens cut food waste

As much as 40% of all food produced each year goes nowhere near a human mouth, resulting in economic, environmental and social costs of an estimated $2.6 trillion.

While there are a multitude of social, cultural and even technological reasons for these staggering statistics, we’ve seen a slew of startups emerge with propositions on how to solve the food-waste problem. Last year, Choco hit the much-coveted unicorn status for software that digitizes the ordering, supply chain and communications processes for suppliers and restaurants. Elsewhere, there are companies serving AI-powered forecasting smarts to help retailers optimize their stock replenishment, while others have built marketplaces for selling surplus or imperfect produce. There’s even a company setting out to transform food waste into food containers.

Another fledgling startup called Kanpla, meanwhile, is focusing its efforts on cutting food waste in one very specific vertical: canteens.

Founded out of Denmark in 2019, Kanpla initially targeted school canteens, serving up software for parents to preorder food for their kids (children under the age of 13 are not allowed a debit card in Denmark), which gave schools a good idea of how much and what kinds of food to prepare. Today, the company targets all manner of canteens, with paying customers including shipping giant Maersk and Danish brewer Carlsberg, as well as industrial canteen providers such as Coor and Cheval Blanc, which serve more than 230 canteens across the Nordics.

In 2022, Kanpla said that its software was used in some 1,500 canteens, and it expects to triple that number this year as it expands into more European markets. In preparation for this growth, the company today announced it has raised €2.2 million ($2.4 million) in a seed round of funding.

How it works

There are two core elements to the Kanpla platform. For kitchens, Kanpla offers what it calls an “operating system” for managing their whole canteen from a PC or mobile device, including creating digital menus, support for different payment types, collecting and presenting sales data, and more. Through this, companies can understand which food sells best, allowing them to stock up on the right kinds of ingredients thereby minimizing produce that might otherwise go to waste.

On the “diner” side, users can access a mobile or web app for perusing menus and ordering food, meaning that their food can be waiting for them when they arrive in the canteen.

On top of that, the Kanpla platform has features specifically for addressing food waste.

For example, it enables kitchens and canteens to sell surplus food from their lunch or buffet menus as takeaways to guests. Through the admin dashboard, they simply list the amount of food available and the price, and a communication is sent to each Kanpla diner’s app.

And Kanpla also has a food-waste registration feature, currently in beta, which brings together data such as the number of people entering a canteen and the amount of food that’s wasted across categories (e.g. in production or uneaten buffet food). This requires kitchens to weigh the food before they throw it out.

Canteens only

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Kanpla’s offering is that it’s so narrowly focused on canteens, something that Kanpla CEO and co-founder Peter Bæch said was simply due to his own experiences.

“The idea to target the canteen industry came from our experience at our local canteens,” Bæch explained to TechCrunch. “We saw firsthand a canteen which threw out huge amounts of food at the end of the day. We thought about how we spent half of our lunch-break waiting in lines. These inconveniences led us to dive into the pains, finding an industry that was heavily behind on digitalization, with additional problems of forecasting, limited tools to manage guest relations and a high degree of manual work for print and billing. These insights became the beginning of our journey to digitalize this industry.”

While canteens undoubtedly share many of the pain points of other eating establishments, each come with their own unique problems and opportunities that require a different approach from a technology standpoint.

“Canteens differentiate from cafes and restaurants by having recurring guests, coming back day after day, giving them a unique potential to connect with their guests” Bæch continued. “Additionally, they have the added complexity and issues due to menus switching daily, and payments working often through hybrid approaches that may include card, invoice and salary deduction.”

Kanpla’s seed round was led by Netherlands-based VC HenQ, with participation from a handful of angel investors. The company said it will use its fresh cash injection to expand beyond its native Denmark and into the U.K., Norway and the Netherlands in 2023, with plans to extend its reach into the U.S. and other European markets the following year.

Denmark has spawned a number of sizeable tech companies through the years, such as expense management software provider Pleo, which hit a $4.7 billion valuation a year ago, while local neobank Lunar achieved a valuation north of $2 billion last year. And then there is, of course, Zendesk, which was bought out by a private equity firm for $10 billion back in June.

HenQ partner Jan Andriessen reckons that Kanpla can blaze a similar trail to Zendesk by cashing in on what initially seems like a niche vertical.

“At first, the canteen industry can seem obscure, but it’s a big market with huge potential,” Andriessen said in a statement. “Many B2B software products have blossomed in seemingly non-obvious markets. Zendesk, one of Denmark’s greatest tech businesses, was founded well before customer success software became a well-defined term. Kanpla can be the same, and that’s what makes them the type of B2B business we’re excited to support.”

Danish startup Kanpla wants to help canteens cut food waste by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch