4 Best Seed Investment Themes in 2021

An article we liked from Thought Leader Joanna Glasner on Crunchbase News:

What This Year’s Seed Funding Tells Us About The Startup Future

Every so often at Crunchbase News, we take it upon ourselves to read through every sizable recent seed funding round.

It’s an exercise that leads to both information overload and a vague sense of where the startup future is headed.

The latest data-dive focused on seed and pre-seed rounds of $2 million or more announced in 2021 — of which there are a little over a thousand reported. The analysis found a few investment themes that stand out as especially popular.

The ones we picked to highlight in our survey include labor-saving robotics, mental health, alternative protein and real estate software. These aren’t brand-new investment sectors, but their continued strong showing indicates VCs see plenty more growth ahead in these spaces.

As to the futuristic vision that these seed funding trends collectively represent, it’s largely a continuation of technology-driven shifts already underway. In other words: Seed startup activities point us toward a future in which we spend more time on our devices, while software and machines do more of our actual work, and we pick through an even broader array of discretionary purchases and digital activities.

Below, we break out four themes in more detail, along with curated lists of funded companies.

Seed Investment Theme #1: Robotics

The world is full of dull and routine work, and there aren’t enough people able or willing to do it at prevailing wages. This state of affairs — combined with increasing sophistication and falling costs of robotics technology — seems to be fueling a rise in seed-focused startups looking to automate a host of unloved tasks.

We put together a curated list of robotics startups that raised seed funding so far this year, featuring companies taking on industries from shipping to farming to food service. It includes: Bear Flag Robotics, a developer of autonomous tractors; Pickle Robot, maker of bots for package handling and logistics; and Chef Robotics, which is bringing robotics to restaurant kitchens.

As these are seed-stage companies, it’s too soon to tell if their offerings will gain broad industry uptake. For now, it’s clear at least that...