WORKWEEK

Future Proofing the Food Supply

Masa Son, Bezos, and a Billion in Venture Dollars

Plenty is a vertical farming company that’s raised a billion dollars. Not valued at a billion dollars like your run of the mill unicorn, Plenty has raised $941M.

I know raising a billion dollars isn’t terribly uncommon for late stage companies, Chime and Stripe have both raised $2.2B, Instacart $2.9B, GoPuff and Databricks $3.5B each, but my early stage mind can’t grok numbers that big. More importantly, I’ve heard of all of those companies and you probably have too. I’d never heard of Plenty.

But, Masa Son led the Series B and Series D with SoftBank’s Vision Fund, pouring $340M into the company, Jeff Bezos invested via Bezos Expeditions, and NFX’s Peter Flint led the Seed way back in 2016. This January they raised another $400M in a Series E.

Which made me wonder, what mission and what market is massive enough to justify Bezos and Masa Son scale returns?

I interviewed Plenty Cofounder and Chief Science Officer Nate Storey to find out. It did not disappoint.