Canopii looks to succeed where past indoor farms have not; plus, Legora reaches $5.55 billion valuation as AI legal tech boom endures

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David Ashton grew up outside of Sacramento and he went to college in San Luis Obispo

during the historic drought of the late 2000s. He spent years driving that 300-mile

stretch between Sacramento and San Luis Obispo enthralled by the never-ending lettuce farms,

acres of leafy green plants against a bleak dry background. The fact that these lush green crops

were grown in drought conditions to be shipped to other parts of the country stuck with Ashton

and it later became the inspiration for his robotic farming startup, Canopy, which looks to shrink

produce supply chains. Portland Oregon-based Canopy builds robotic greenhouses that can

autonomously run the whole crop growing process from seeding to harvest without human intervention.

These greenhouses can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce a year

while requiring only one spigot of water and taking up the same space as a basketball cord.

The farms are manufactured by GK designs and are currently designed to grow herbs and specialty

greens like baby bok choy and gailan, a Chinese broccoli. Ashton told TechCrunch that he started

really sowing the seeds for Canopy after the Portland-based ag tech company he was set to work at,

filed for bankruptcy, while he was driving up the coast to move there. He worked on the plants at

night while his wife was in medical school. After three years, he applied for a $250,000 grant

from the National Science Foundation to build a prototype of his vision. After that was successful,

he applied for a $1 million grant to build a full-scale prototype. He said,

five years later, we've hit a major milestone for the farm. We have an autonomous farm that

grows everything from seed to harvest without any human intervention, and we did so with a very

small team and very little capital, which I think is very different from what the rest of the

industry had experienced. The company has raised approximately $3.6 million so far, with 2.3 million

of that largely from grants and the rest from strategics. Ashton is aware of what many investors

in VCs think about the indoor farming category. The once-hot sector saw companies like Bowery Farming

and Plenty raise hundreds of millions of dollars before going bankrupt and before seeing any

strong success. He argues their product is fundamentally different than vertical farms,

and that the company's decision to move intentionally slow and without venture capital has

allowed them to avoid many of those same hurdles. Ashton said, the capital stack has to be

diversified beyond VC. We're five now, and we're still just iterating on one farm, which has

allowed us to learn so much. I think if we got VC right away and we try to scale after year one or

two, that's not possible with food infrastructure. The company has gotten inbound interest from schools,

restaurants, casinos, and others. Now that the company has said its automation milestone,

it looks to build out its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. Down the line,

canopy plans to franchise these farms in the future. And yes, raise venture capital once it's

ready. Ashton said, we can mass produce it like a car. I think a big achievement on this farm is

that the whole thing runs off 100 amps and 240 volts. That's house power. You can literally

put this in a backyard. And that speaks to the level of resource management that we've reached

in this farm. Lagora, an AI platform for lawyers, is now valued at more than $5.5 billion

following a $550 million series D set to fuel its growth in the US. That is despite growing

competition from rival Harvey, but also with Microsoft co-pilot and generalist large language models.

Publicly listed legal software companies saw their stocks drop when anthropic unveiled a legal

plug-in for Claude. Lagora is built on top of LLMs and mostly on Claude, but it's positioning as

a platform that supports lawyers with complex cases, gives CEO Max Yunstrond some peace of mind.

It's amazing that everybody can have their own pocket lawyer in Claude, but we're not solving

for the same use case. He said via a live stream at the Tech Arena conference in Stockholm.

But the focus on embedding itself into its clients workflows. Lagora's platform is now used by

800 law firms and legal teams. And investors took note. Its series D was led by Excel,

with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Bessimer, General Catalyst,

Iconic, Red Point Ventures, and Y Combinator. And some new backers as well.

There are other signs that investors are bullish about AI legal tech. Lagora's series D

and valuation jump come just a few months after its October 150 million dollar series C round

led at a $1.8 billion valuation. Its competitor, Harvey, which is backed by Andreessen Harowitz,

is already valued at $8 billion, and is now reportedly seeking to race at an $11 billion

valuation. According to Deal Room, they are also on almost identical trajectories with regard to

revenue. Both are also branching out globally. Harvey is pushing hard in the Europe and Lagora

in the opposite direction. The company is now headquartered in New York, and keen to keep on pushing

into the US market where its growth exceeded its expectations coming out of Europe.

In addition to New York and Stockholm, Lagora has offices in Bangalore, London, and Sydney with

more to follow. Alongside its series D, Lagora announced it would open offices in Houston and

Chicago with plans to open additional local hubs and grow to more than 300 employees across its

US offices by the end of this year. That's all for now to find more stories like these go to techcrunch.com.