Green Labs, an innovative Blockchain -based 'smart farming' platform, has secured $18 million in Series B funding.
With the funding round led by Hashed, a blockchain focused venture capital firm headquartered out of Seoul and San Francisco, Green Labs has raised $28 million in funding to date.
This is a significant milestone for the agricultural data startup, as it plans to grow its current user base in the farming industry from 20,000 to 100,000.
Green Labs believes that a state of the art agricultural data collection platform is the industry disruptor needed to improve crop production.
Crop Growth Management and Analytics to Enhance Farming Distribution
Started in 2017 within the domestic Korean farming market, Green Labs facilitates increased efficiency in crop production, market development, and distribution using its Farm Morning service.
The agricultural data hub supplies collected market data to all participants, eliminating asymmetric information that can harm farming production and final outputs.
Besides acting as a data aggregation and management platform, Green Labs can also provide optimized crop growth management through its 24/7 controlled farming ecosystem.
Based on analyzed inputs from the Farm Morning service, the environment to enhance overall crop production can be fine tuned and upgraded.
Funding Allows for Increased Innovation
Besides the services already offered by Green Labs, the startup plans to grow and support additional farming based services.
Some of the projects currently being focused on revolve around wholesale price analysis, e-commerce, live commerce, and influencer partnerships.
Green Labs wants to continue to provide as much value as possible to the farming community while making the greater public aware of the new possibilities its platform can enable.
The company aims to grow into a full one-stop shop with the completion of this additional funding round, helping farmers from the production phase to the distribution phase.
The Series B funding will also allow Green Labs to focus on auxiliary investments to grow its platform, such as upgrading the technology of already established smart farms, launching agricultural exchanges, creating an easier way to purchase agricultural materials online, and adding to the direct trade possibilities for agricultural products.
To achieve its ambitious roadmap, Green Labs plans to use a portion of the funding round to recruit fresh talent for the company and to seek potential acquisition opportunities that can strengthen its services and product offerings.
When asked about Green Labs' future outlook, Sang-hoon Shin, Green Labs' CEO, commented, “We will lead in innovation to maximize the value added of data generated at agricultural sites through this funding. By recording key data generated by Green Labs' value chain in blockchain, all participants will be able to build a transparent and reliable agricultural data economy platform.”
The collaboration between Green Labs and Hashed in the Series B round looks to have been a mutually beneficial one. Green Labs gained a world-class fundraising team to work with, and Hashed gained a stake in an innovative startup operating in a fast-growing industry.
Hashed is one of the biggest blockchain venture capital firms globally, having raised over $120 million in capital for its first fund.
