📝 The weekly wrap

"Agriculture is a sector that has been unfortunately neglected and underinvested. This trend is particularly prominent when comparing the development of novel human health drugs to crop health products, where human pharmaceuticals has progressed significantly over the last few decades, whereas agricultural innovation has stalled – for example, of the top 10 herbicides in the market today, 7 were launched before 2000."

"While many companies have the best of intentions, executives can be forced to use antiquated processes to comply with legal requirements. The CDC estimates that 60 percent of American adults have a chronic health condition or disability, and yet the fear and stigma of the disclosure process results in a paltry 3.2 percent disclosure rate among United States employees. Disclo empowers employees to confidentiality disclose any disability or accommodation needs."

"It takes about 15 minutes to write a personalized email, and the average time a recipient takes to read it is 15 seconds. Lavender’s mission is to help bridge this gap so sales reps can focus on what they do best: building relationships and selling products.

Lavender scores every email on a scale of 1 to 100 against metrics such as sentence length, the ratio of I’s to You’s, and mobile friendliness. Lavender’s AI will then suggest edits in real-time to optimize the email."

"Designed around a “Kubernetes as a service” offering, Kubeark’s open infrastructure-agnostic platform is built to scale any software product integrating deployment and management into business processes. It enables software vendors to remove the complexity of their application development lifecycle by deploying, managing, and scaling applications on any type of infrastructure, from private or public cloud to on-premises, for both open and closed systems."

"As developers shift toward microservices, testing the interconnection of application components is becoming ubiquitous and an integral part of the development process. AtomicJar has widely become the leading open-source software for integration tests, with ~7 million monthly Docker downloads and a vibrant and passionate developer community. The community’s growth is accelerating."

"Since we first met Hnry, they've grown to become the largest accountancy firm in New Zealand and launched in Australia. Most of their customers join through word of mouth, and once a customer signs up, they stick around, leading to excellent unit economics and strong capital efficiency. While we loved the large market of sole traders and the innovative product approach, what really set Hnry apart was the execution of the team."