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David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.

This January, John McElhone moved to Santa Monica from, as he described it, “a tiny farm in the absolute middle of nowhere” in his native Northern Ireland, with the goal of growing the crop-monitoring tech startup he founded.

It looks like McElhone’s big move is beginning to pay off: His company, CropSafe, announced a $3 million seed funding round on Tuesday that will help it develop and scale its remote crop-monitoring capabilities for farmers. Venture firm Elefund led the round and was joined by investors Foundation Capital, Global Founders Capital, V1.VC and Great Oaks Capital, as well as angel investors Cory Levy, Josh Browder and Charlie Songhurst. The capital will go toward growing CropSafe’s six-person engineering team and building up its new U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica.

The nascent agtech company began in 2019 as a project between McElhone and his co-founder and high school classmate, Micheál McLaughlin. Growing up in the Northern Irish countryside, the pair developed an interest in technology, which led to ideas about how such technology could aid the agricultural communities they were raised around.

“We noticed that there was a lot of really new, cool technology coming into the farming market at the time,” McElhone told dot.LA. “But every single farmer in our area hadn't a clue how to get started with all this new fancy technology, because they would have to go to training sessions or learn how satellite imagery from NASA works. And farmers—their job is to farm, not to interpret data.”

The first version of CropSafe’s software aimed to bridge that gap. At its core, the platform is an interpretation engine that scrapes and parses through troves of weather data and satellite imagery to find the information that farmers need to grow and harvest more effectively. “CropSafe did that work for you and spots useful nuggets like, ‘Hey, there's blight in field no. 14; here's the exact location and what you need to do next,’” McElhone explained.

But the project, which began simply as a tool for friends and family in Northern Ireland, started drawing attention from users around the world; to the founders’ surprise, people began offering to pay for the service. “That was kind of a turning point—realizing it wasn't just our 200 people that wanted to use it,” McElhone said. So he packed his bags and moved to Southern California at the start of this year to try to build out the software in one of agtech’s hottest markets.

McElhone and McLaughlin now believe there’s a better way forward that would position CropSafe as more akin to a fintech platform for farmers: Because the software collects so much data on farms, it can offer insights into removing bottlenecks that farmers could leverage to secure crucial financing for equipment and other needs.

“If a farm is leasing three combines this year, with the data we have on that farm [and its] crops, we might be able to say: ‘Hey, if you lease an additional combine this year, we know that you will produce so-and-so additional yield and produce $25,000,’” according to McElhone. In an ideal scenario, CropSafe could allow the financing for that combine to be approved instantly on the strength of the data on its platform; the farmer clicks a button on the app, and the combine gets delivered the next day.

So far, McElhone is tight-lipped about partnerships in this area of its business, but said announcements should be coming this summer. The company is also considering offering farmers insights into the best times and places to sell crops, with CropSafe taking a small cut of revenues for the service. (The idea is that farmers would only pay when they see increased sales from using CropSafe’s insights, McElhone said.)

But the move to Santa Monica has already proven fertile for the company, which is planning to announce partnerships with other agtech companies that would allow CropSafe to act more as an operating system—one connecting autonomous tractors, weathers sensors, and other “internet of things” technologies to ensure better, more sustainable crops. With local startups like Future Acres and Abundant Robotics already operating in the space, CropSafe seems poised to benefit from Southern California’s position as a hub for agtech in the U.S.

David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.

Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

This week in “Raises”: A consumer brand holding company, a software platform for contractors, an AR/Web3 gaming platform and an organic feminine care brand all raised sizable rounds. Meanwhile, Fung Capital veterans John Seung and Janie Yu are seeking to raise $200 million for a new fund.

Redbud Brands, a consumer brand holding company, raised $46 million in new investment led by Satori Capital.

BuildOps, a management software platform for commercial contractors, raised a $43 million Series A funding round led by Next47.

Jadu, an augmented reality Web3 gaming platform, raised $36 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Crypto.

Rael, an organic feminine care and beauty brand, raised a $35 million Series B funding round led by Colopl Next and Signite Partners.

Astroforge, an asteroid-mining startup, raised $13 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital.

PayEngine, a payments platform for software vendors, raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Point72 Ventures.

Fyxt, a cloud-based operations platform for commercial real estate, raised a $4 million Series A funding round led by RET Ventures.

Fanimal, a live events ticketing platform, raised $4 million in funding led by Bullpen Capital.

CropSafe, an agtech startup that helps farmers monitor their fields, raised $3 million in seed funding led by Elefund.

Japa Health, a digital health and wellness platform, raised a $1.25 million seed funding round led by Arcsync Co.

LFX Venture Partners, a venture capital and private equity firm, is looking to raise $200 million for its debut fund, per an SEC filing.

Hedonova, an alternative assets hedge fund, raised $18.4 million from Chemie-Tech DMCC in a Series A1 funding round.

Raises is dot.LA’s weekly feature highlighting venture capital funding news across Southern California’s tech and startup ecosystem. Please send fundraising news to Decerry Donato (decerrydonato@dot.la).

Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

Angelenos could soon enjoy dinner and a movie to go along with a fully-charged Tesla.

As reported by Electrek, the Elon Musk-led electric automaker has filed plans with the city of Los Angeles for a new charging station at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Orange Drive in Hollywood. But the facility, complete with 34 charging stalls, is no ordinary EV charging station: Tesla also wants to build a diner and dine-in movie theater that will allow drivers to enjoy a meal and 30-minute short features while their vehicles charge.

The proposed two-story location will feature two movie screens visible from both the parking lot and a rooftop outdoor seating area. Inside, the bottom floor will house the kitchen, bar and dining area. The second-story rooftop area, which will also have a bar and table seating, will incorporate theater-style seating, as well. Visitors waiting in their cars can also experience a Sonic-style carhop service that will bring their food out to them, according to the plans.

Musk first floated the idea of a drive-in restaurant charging station in 2018; Tesla initially planned to open the location in Santa Monica, but local regulations prompted the company to relocate its designs to Hollywood, according to Electrek. In February, Musk tweeted that the facility would accept the crypto meme-coin Dogecoin, which he is a prominent backer of, as payment.

Los Angeles is already home to an enviable number of EV charging stations, with California at large representing more than 40% of all electric vehicles in the entire U.S. With the state hoping to only further grow EV adoption, charging stations are popping up with even more regularity—with the Kia Forum in Inglewood installing stations of its own and charging startup ChargeNet aiming to incorporate chargers at fast food restaurants like Taco Bell.

Tesla’s plans come as Musk, the company’s CEO, faces controversy over sexual misconduct allegations and his proposed private takeover of Twitter. Tesla’s own stock has taken a hit amid the Twitter deal.

Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

Jadu, a Los Angeles-based augmented reality (AR) startup, has raised $36 million to build a gaming platform that lets players roam the real world with their NFT avatars.

Bain Capital led the Series A round and was joined by existing investor General Catalyst Partners. Other investors include LG Tech Ventures and Alumni Ventures. The new raise brings Jadu’s total funding to more than $45 million.

Launched in 2020, Jadu is developing an AR mobile app that connects to players’ Ethereum wallets, letting them turn their 3D animated NFTs into playable avatars. The app, which is expected to emerge from beta testing this summer, can integrate avatars from NFT collections like Deadfellaz, CyberKongz and FLUFs, as well as some from “The Sandbox” video game, according to Jadu.

Unlike other AR experiences where users navigate from a first-person point of view (think “Pokemon Go”), Jadu players can stay put and move their avatar characters around bedrooms or backyards. It has the effect of playing a third-person video game—with the real world as the landscape.

“Adding an avatar in the middle of [a player’s] view is a novel concept for AR, and it's kind of counterintuitive,” Jadu founder and CEO Asad J. Malik told dot.LA. “However, when you do it, suddenly it becomes really effective because your AR becomes super visual. You can actually see a representation of a character going around the room doing things.”

The roughly 50-person company—which has much of its leadership team, including Malik, based in Los Angeles—started with an AR mobile app that let users dance next to life-like holograms of music artists like Lil Nas X and Pussy Riot. The idea was that users could record clips and post them on social media, showcasing complex AR experiences that weren’t available on other platforms, according to Malik. Some videos went viral on TikTok, and the initial iteration of Jadu was briefly among the 30 most downloaded entertainment apps in Apple’s App Store, Malik said.

But the goal was always to build a more expansive AR platform, and the Jadu team saw a chance to do that with the emergence of NFTs and the larger phenomenon of Web3, a vision for a decentralized version of the internet based on blockchain technology. Jadu quickly pivoted to building AR gameplay for Web3 avatars, selling accessories like jetpacks and hoverboards as NFTs. The startup earned more than $5 million from initial NFT sales, Malik said, and collects a 5% commission on the roughly $25 million in secondary sales those NFTs have done to date on platforms like OpenSea.

“We had always been looking for the right business model for AR and nothing had ever clicked,” Malik said, adding that in-app purchases or ads didn’t make sense. So when NFTs came along “that opportunity became so glaringly obvious to us that we immediately hard-pivoted,” he added.

Jadu plans to spend the new funds to grow its team and build out the gaming platform. Malik said the company is focused on releasing its first collection of in-house avatar NFTs, which is expected to be its primary revenue source this year. As the platform matures, Malk could foresee Jadu eventually charging commissions for third-parties to develop game items or experiences on its platform, he said.

The Jadu founder contends the near-term future of the metaverse—the loosely-defined term for the immersive and extensive online worlds—is with AR and not virtual reality, where users are completely immersed in 3D digital environments. He noted consumers have been slow to adopt VR headsets like Meta’s Quest or Sony’s Playstation VR; by contrast, more than a billion mobile devices can support the AR experiences Jadu is developing, Malik said.

“People are building out the metaverse as this interoperable virtual world,” Malik said. “We are building out what we call the ‘Mirrorverse’ as the AR reflection of that, and the ‘Mirrorverse’ exists on the physical planet—it exists on top of the world as we know it, and we think that's super compelling.”

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

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