Startup Watch: Pipefy, Pink Farms, Growth Tech

New-York based VC fund Insight Partners led a US$45mn series B investment round for Brazilian startup Pipefy, which develops a management platform based on the Lean methodology.

OpenView and Trinity Ventures, which are already investors in the company, also participated in the Series B funding. The investments made in the startup since its creation in 2015 have now reached US$65mn.

According to Pipefy, the new funds will be used to accelerate product development and the company's go-to-market strategy.

Pipefy serves customers in more than 150 countries, ranging from small businesses to large corporations, through startups and scale-ups fostered by venture capital funds.

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São Paulo agritech investment fund SP Ventures and capital seed platform Capital Lab invested 2mn reais (US$533,000) into Pink Farms, the first Latin American indoor farm for the production of vegetables.

Pink Farms will use the investment to build a large-scale factory to serve the city of São Paulo, SP Ventures said in a statement. The company also plans to increase its portfolio with products such as strawberry and tomato, improve current technology, and make new developments.

According to SP Ventures, Pink Farms’ indoor farm is 100 times more productive than open field crops due to its production at multi-level structures without contact with the external environment, and the production also benefits from a reduction in water consumption of up to 95% and up to 50% in the case of fertilizer use.

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Brazilian construction firm Cyrela and regtech startup Growth Tech claim to have carried the first real estate transaction with blockchain technology in Brazil.

Growth Tech's Notary Ledgers platform used IBM’s blockchain technology.

"A digitally signed document in our platform will have the same validity as a manually signed one in a physical notary because the validations of the transactions are also done by Notary Ledgers notaries, and these transactions also have a high level of security and transparency, which will help avoid fraud and improve the delivery time of the services,” Growth Tech CEO Hugo Pierre said in a press release.