Green Labs, a Seoul and San Francisco based startup pioneering smart farming using Internet of Things (IoT), has completed its Series B round. The $18 million round was headed by one of South Korea’s leading blockchain venture capital firms, Hashed, bringing Green Labs’ fundraising total to $28 million to date. The capital will allow the startup to work towards its goals faster, including plans to expand human resources across all areas of its operations.
Green Labs already has an innovative live platform and 20,000 customer user base, but expects to quintuple its users to 100,000 over the next six months following this development.
Smart Farming Uses Data to Enhance the Entire Supply Chain
Beginning operations in 2017, Green Labs entered the Korean smart farming market with a new way to strengthen crop production and distribution. The introduction of its Farm Morning service created a platform to aggregate reliable data and self manage farming procedures using AI, giving farmers more insight into their crop lifecycle. Farmers can also use the data gathered to modify their production and optimize their operations, all without the need to be on-site.
Farm Morning’s Growth Environment Optimization Engine uses the information collected from all the farmers on its platform to determine the best crop growing environment. Further down the product’s distribution, Farm Morning uses available market data and historical trends to help farmers choose their best possible sales channel.
Hashed Couldn’t Hold Back
The smart farming upgrades offered by Green Labs compelled Hashed to move aggressively to secure funding for the company. Hashed raised over $120 million at the end of 2020, allowing for the allocation of funds to projects that have significant potential to grow within their respective industry, a move it made with the close of the Green Labs Series B round.
The investors behind Hashed’s $120 million raise remain undisclosed, but the firm’s backing has been attributed to some of South Korea’s most influential infotech firms. With both Hashed and Green Labs having expertise in the South Korean market, the duo have solidified a partnership that promises a bright future for its domestic farming sector, as well as internationally. CEO of Hashed, Seo-joon Kim, “expects Green Labs, a leader in the data agriculture industry, to introduce blockchain to build an agricultural data protocol that innovates beyond production and distribution.”
The smart farming market has already begun to establish itself, with an estimated value of about $4.9 billion, but there is still a lot of room to grow. With the current global agriculture market standing at $5 trillion, smart farming’s ability to increase productivity across the entire supply chain will continue to push its market dominance to new levels. Companies that provide cutting edge agricultural tech solutions like Green Labs will continue to build out the future of the farming economy, an industry that is ripe for disruptors.
