As cloud adoption continues to surge towards the $1 trillion mark in annual spend, we’re seeing a wave of enterprise startups gaining traction with customers and investors for tools to help manage that usage. In the latest development, a startup called Alkira has raised $100 million for “network infrastructure as a service”, which lets users […]
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Harness Lab isn’t founder Jyoti Bansal’s first startup. He sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, the week it was supposed to go public. His latest venture has raised $425 million, per Crunchbase. On Tuesday, Harness announced $150 million in debt financing, essentially a line of credit that the company can draw on […]
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Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s also MyForest Foods and Fable Food.
Then there’s Meati Foods, which claims it’s like no other alternative protein. The company makes cutlets and steaks from mycelium, or mushroom root.
“It’s truly a next generation revolutionary protein,” CEO Phil Graves told TechCrunch. “It’s a product that’s rooted in nature. It’s not genetically modified. We just take something from nature, channel it, give it the nutrients and minerals that it needs to flourish. We then get the equivalent of hundreds of cows worth of protein in four or five days time.”
Perhaps that’s why Meati continues to secure some big funding.
Meati Foods’ Carne Asada Steaks product. (Image credit: Meati Foods)
On Wednesday, the Boulder, Colo.-based company announced an additional $100 million in a C-1 round. Existing investor Grosvenor Food & AgTech led the round and was joined by other existing investors, including Prelude Ventures, BOND, Revolution Growth and Congruent. Grosvenor is a big-time food and ag investing, having previously backed companies like AgriWebb and The Every Co.
This big rounds adds to the significant amount of venture capital Meati Foods raised in the past two years. An initial $150 million was announced in July 2022, and that round took in another $22 million in January 2023 before ultimately closing a Series C of over $200 million later on in 2023.
Much of the company’s investments were funneled into the 100,000-square-foot “Mega Ranch” facility that enables Meati to produce an annual rate of tens of millions of pounds of its protein.
However, not everything has been rosy for the company. This new funding comes three months after Meati Foods laid off 13% of its employees. At the same time, company co-founder Tyler Huggins stepped down as CEO to transition into the role of chief innovation officer. That’s when Graves, the company’s chief financial officer at the time, took the helm.
Following this latest round, Huggins, who started the company with Justin Whiteley, will transition to an advisory role.
In addition to the funding, Meati Foods is adding 2,000 retail locations that carry its products and will now be in Kroger’s family of stores by April. Three products in the Eat Meati line will be available, including the Classic cutlet as well as Classic and Carne Asada steaks.
In just over a year, the company grew from six retail locations to nearly 7,000 stores nationwide. It is also available in Super Target, Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmers Market, Meijer and Wegmans.
The company is usually pretty mum about its growth, and this time was no different. Graves did say that the Mega Ranch facility was fully operational. Last year, Huggins told TechCrunch that at full capacity, the facility would be able to make 45 million pounds of product annually.
“The capital basically turbocharges that growth trajectory,” Graves said. “We’ll continue that break-neck pace of growth. We’re thrilled that despite all the headwinds that our growth is still on pace. And our investors understand that. The product is best-in-class and the growth is there. We need to marry the capital to the business to continue the momentum.”
As part of the new investment, Mark Cupta from Prelude Ventures and Katrin Burt from Grosvenor Food & AgTech have joined the company as new board members.
Enterprises and other large organizations have long been a lucrative and obvious target for cybercriminals, but in recent years — thanks to more sophisticated breach techniques and the rise of AI — small and medium businesses are now also very much on the map. Now Coro — one of the startups building tools specifically for smaller businesses — is announcing a big round of funding after seeing its recurring revenues shoot up 300% in the last year. It has raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding. Sources close to the deal tell TechCrunch that its valuation is over $750 million post-money.
Up to now, the New York–based Coro has focused squarely on the U.S. market — no surprise, given that there are more than 33 million SMBs in that country alone — but with this round, the startup wants to scale its business internationally, starting with Europe. To that end, it’s notable that the lead investor in this round is One Peak, the U.K. later-stage firm focusing on enterprise tech. Previous backers Energy Impact Partners and Balderton Capital are also participating.
Coro also plans to use the funding to continue working on its R&D — specifically in bringing ever more AI tools into its one-stop-shop platform in order to better match and ideally beat the capabilities of the most sophisticated malicious hackers.
IBM research estimated that the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, and while single attacks aiming at very large organizations may still grab the most headlines, cybercriminals have increasingly started to focus more on SMBs, applying the law of economies of scale and using one of the biggest trends in enterprise in the last two decades — the rise and domination of SaaS.
“The barrier of entry for attackers has dropped dramatically over the last two years,” said Dror Liwer, the company’s co-founder and CMO, in an interview. The culprit, he said, is the rise of attack-as-a-service techniques, specifically ransomware-as-a-service.
“In the past, in order to execute a very sophisticated attack, you needed to know a lot and the attack itself was very expensive to execute. Today, you can go to a website, upload a list, and rent an attack and go after a market. So the cost of the attack also has dropped tremendously. It means the ROI of attacking a mid-market or small business has improved dramatically, because it used to be very expensive to do that.”
Liwer said that in the past it could have cost $1 million to gain lists of 100,000 because of the payoff. Now you can pay $50,000 for many lists apiece, “and still be still very, very profitable.”
Those stats are definitely being felt by startups. Last year, some 73% of small businesses reported security incidents, according to research from Tripwire. And among SMBs responding to a survey from DigitalOcean, 74% named data privacy a top concern.
The opportunity in the security market for SMBs that Coro has identified is that these businesses typically lack the teams and internal IT budgets to dedicate to building and managing their defenses. Coro’s approach has therefore been to build all-in-one platforms covering the various points of entry that a criminal might take, including email protection, endpoint protection and cloud protection. It’s working in a competitive space. Others in the same category include very large providers like CrowdStrike through to younger startups like CyberSmart and Guardz.
But the growth that Coro has been seeing particularly in the mid-market (50 to 2,000 employees), using channel partners like ISPs to go to market, has been what’s caught the eye of investors.
“As a growth investor, we look for companies that target large, underserved markets and are in prime position to dominate that field,” said David Klein, co-founder and managing partner of One Peak, in a statement. “Coro has already achieved phenomenal growth and success in the SME market. We are convinced that Coro has the right tech stack, a world class management team, and unlimited potential to scale the business to the next level. We’re excited to partner with Coro to help them execute on their vision and support the team in their next leg of explosive growth.”
For some context on Coro’s valuation: At a time when startups, especially those that are later stage, are still finding it hard to close rounds, Coro — which got its start as CoroNet on the Disrupt Battlefield stage — has been on a yearly cadence. Its round last year, in April 2023, was $75 million at a $575 million valuation (also post-money).
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