New Zealand and Ireland-based deep tech startup Marama Labs has closed a seed-plus round of €1.75 million. The Yield Lab, a European agritech venture capital firm with participation from existing investors, including New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, Icehouse Ventures, Quidnet Ventures and angel groups from New Zealand, led the investment.
This new funding will allow Marama Labs to scale up hardware manufacturing capacity in New Zealand for its patented CloudSpec spectroscopy instrumentation and cloud software data analytics tools, which enable opaque liquid samples, like fermenting wines and nanomedicines, to be instantly analysed.
"This oversubscribed funding round demonstrates new and existing investors' conviction for Marama Labs' vision of optimising the world's liquid resources through spectroscopy analysis," said Dr Brendan Darby, CEO and co-founder of Marama Labs.
"2024 will be a seminal year for Marama as we continue creating value for our winemaking customers and expand CloudSpec into the rapidly growing life-sciences market."
CloudSpec equips winemakers with previously unavailable quantitative chemical data to support and enhance their decision-making throughout the winemaking process.
"Before CloudSpec, colour and phenolic analysis was time-consuming, expensive, and overly complex. We've simplified the process and are seeing our customers gain valuable business insights by using this data in the vineyard, winery and retail market".
CloudSpec-Insights couples the CloudSpec hardware device with a wine-specific web application, where data generated by the device on wine samples are visualised for winemakers to make informed decisions.
The company is also partnering with third-party testing labs to make the technology available to smaller wineries, and its customers include iconic New Zealand wineries Giesen and Cloudy Bay and ultra-premium small producers in Napa, US.
Marama Labs plans to expand its global footprint in the wine industry and launch its first product to the life-sciences market this year.
