A few years ago, the benefits of wearing a ring to track your heart rate and temperature might have seemed like something of interest to your gadget-obsessed cousin, but few others.

But, but, but...Since 2020, organizations from the NBA to the Department of Defense have used Oura rings as part of their strategies to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. And that’s just one example in a broader pattern of the pandemic accelerating adoption of digital-health tech, as more people have embraced telemedicine, at-home fitness setups, and mental health apps.

Even as the world continues to seek a return to “normal,” many changes in the ways we use tech for our health and well-being may be here to stay.

We pulled together five charts to show the current state of digital health—click here to view them all, and read on for an excerpt.

While growth in wearables hasn’t been as rapid as with other digital-health tech, the way consumers, companies, and health care professionals use the data they provide is changing.

• “A lot of times, [these] wearables are giving you data, but they’re not really telling you what to do with it. I think there’s going to be a lot more partnerships among the different data providers,” Kaia Colban, emerging tech research analyst at Pitchbook, told Emerging Tech Brew.

An Apple Watch, for example, could track metrics like your heart rate and your oxygen level and share that data with a sleep monitoring device to determine the optimal light and temperature for the highest sleep quality, Colban said.

Big picture: “In order to create preventative medicine and a holistic offering, it’s not going to be [that] one device does everything,” Colban said. “A lot more companies focused on integration in the past year, and just creating standardized APIs so they can transmit this data to other systems.”

Click here to see the full piece, with all five charts.—GD

The world of vertical farming is…sigh…growing.

Historically...Agriculture was an outdoor business, with farmers only able to grow certain crops in certain climates at certain times of the year—vertical farming aims to upend that millenniums-old truth.

• Vertical farms typically use a combination of agricultural techniques and technology, from IoT sensors to algorithms, to create controlled indoor settings capable of growing foods year-round, sometimes at a higher output per square foot than traditional farms.

In 2021, global indoor farming startups raised $1.6 billion across 70 deals, per Pitchbook—that’s ~86% more money than the sector raised in 2020.

• The space has already seen one megadeal this year: Plenty netted $400 million just last week, which it claims is the largest funding round ever for an indoor farming company, and struck a strategic partnership with Walmart.
• And two weeks ago, Upward Farms, a Brooklyn-based startup, announced plans to build a new 250,000-square-foot farm in eastern Pennsylvania. When the facility opens in 2023, Upward says it will be the largest indoor farm in the world, though it wouldn’t disclose the farm’s expected capacity.

Looking ahead…Large vertical farm companies like Plenty, AeroFarms, and Upward Farms are already selling their products to big retailers like Walmart, Whole Foods, Stop & Shop, and Shop-Rite.

Walmart spokesperson Tricia Moriarty told us the company plans to buy leafy greens from Plenty’s Los Angeles farm “for all of its California stores,” once the farm opens in the second half of 2022, but Walmart will still source the “vast majority” of its produce from traditional farming.

Click here to read our full primer on vertical farming.—JM

Global venture funding completely smashed records last year, rising to $643 billion—up 92% from $335 billion in 2020, per Crunchbase.

What about 2022? In January, VCs continued to throw around cash like a parent on a vacation high, dishing out $61 billion, according to Crunchbase. While not a record, that’s $20 billion more than the most prolific month of 2020, and up there with the biggest months ever.

Let’s take a look at a few emerging tech companies that grabbed a fraction of those funds last month:

• Eikon Therapeutics, a drug discovery startup helmed by a host of biotech veterans, raised a $517.8 million Series B. The two-year-old, California–based startup will use the money to fuel its drug discovery and development program, which is based on a “super-resolution” microscopy technique that allows scientists to see the movement of individual molecules within a cell.
• Hydrostor, a long-duration energy storage (LDES) company, netted a $250 million investment round from Goldman Sachs. The Toronto–based company uses compressed air to store energy in “purpose-built caverns” for up to 12 hours, compared to around four hours for lithium-ion batteries. It currently has projects in California, Canada, and Australia.
• Exotec raised a $335 million Series D to continue building out its warehouse automation products and services. The company helps its clients automate warehouse operations through proprietary hardware—like its autonomous warehouse bots—and software.
• OpenSea, the main NFT marketplace, raised a $300 million Series C that brought its valuation to $13.3 billion. It also faced some challenges last month: One user claimed 16 of their NFTs were stolen, leading OpenSea to intervene. Later in the month, a database outage caused some NFTs to disappear from its site. Both events prompted questions about the platform’s centralizing role in the decentralization-loving crypto world.

Click here to view on-site.—DM

Stat: Facebook’s daily active users fell for the first time ever, from 1.93 billion in Q3 2021 to 1.929 in Q4.

Quote: “The important thing to recognize here is the 4G experience was smartphone applications looking for spectrum. The 5G experience, thus far, has been spectrum looking for applications.”—Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chairman, to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: The case for mass electric golf cart-ification.

Automated security validation: US enterprises are undergoing digital transformation on a massive scale, exposing critical security gaps. Get a walk-through of how more than 400 enterprises pinpoint their exploitable attack surfaces to increase security readiness at Pentera’s webinar at 9am PT on Feb. 23.*

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Tesla released its own in-car karaoke microphone in China.
• A startup claims it will be able to recognize your face from your DNA.
• A new hovercraft startup’s CEO said that by 2030 “more people will use our product than will drive a car.”
• Owning crypto could make you more desirable in the dating world, according to a survey from an investment platform that offers a crypto wallet.

The AI field moves fast, but this week the envelope-pushing AI announcements came at an especially dizzying pace:

• Google AI released a blog about recent work training a robotic system to perform 24 tasks that it had not previously encountered. Big deal, you might think, I do new stuff all the time. Be that as it may, AI systems are famously bad at generalizing beyond what they are explicitly trained to do. So, kudos to this one.
• DeepMind, which is also owned by Alphabet, created an AI system named AlphaCode to write computer programs. When vetted against challenges used in coding competitions, AlphaCode would have been in the 54th percentile of human coders.
• And, speaking of competitions, OpenAI trained an algorithm to solve some math olympiad problems.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• ‘Hey Alexa’ no more? A new feature deemphasizes Alexa’s ‘wake word’
• 5G still needs its ‘killer app’
• The global race for battery production is underway