Forward Food Tech Podcast

Today our guests are Antony Yousefian and Sadia Ahmed from Bx. Bx is building a two-sided marketplace that connects growers who want to store more carbon in the soil with corporates who need to offset their carbon emissions. It is farm-inspired blockchain technology, incentivising growers to change behaviours to climate-smart practices and financially rewarding them using carbon credit tokens.

Antony co-founded Bx along with Ben Bardsley and is passionate about technology that can drive a positive impact. He started his career in asset management and has worked on internationalising CICC, one of China's leading investment banking firms. He has over five years of experience working in Ag-Tech, during which he scaled the 30MHz data platform from the Netherlands to over 40 countries worldwide. 

Our other guest, Sadia is the Chief Innovation Officer at Bx. Having completed her PhD in Computational Ecology at Imperial College London, she has spent the last decade working with large corporations on innovation and developing commercial solutions in sustainability and life sciences. In her current role, she leads the Business Development activities of Bx on its journey to create climate-tech solutions and scale up internationally. Enjoy the conversation between Rob, Sadia and Antony!

Learn more about Bx: https://bx-earth.com/
Connect with Antony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonyyousefian/
Connect with Sadia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sadia-e-ahmed-83b21a78/
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In this episode, our guest is Kasi McReddie. Kasi is the Business Development Manager for Livestock & Aquaculture at the Agri-Epi Centre. Kasi comes from a dairy farming background and has specific expertise in biotech solutions to animal and environmental health challenges.

The Agri-EPI Centre is one of the four UK Agri-tech Innovation Centres established by the UK government in 2016. Agri-EPI provides technical and project management expertise, access to world-class research and innovation facilities. Agri Epi has over 170 members across agriculture, technology, and the supply chain. 

Kasi will tell us what benefits and opportunities AgriEpi offers to agritech and foodtech companies in more detail, we'll learn about Agri Epi's Smart Farms and Satellite Farms portfolio and how businesses can get involved. Kasi also speaks about what businesses should consider from a farmer's perspective and her prediction for the changes we're expecting to see on-farm over the next five years.

Here's the conversation between Rob and Kasi.

Learn more about the Agri-Epi Centre: https://agri-epicentre.com/
Follow Kasi on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasimcreddie/

In this episode, our guest is David Farquhar, CEO of IGS. IGS is an agritech business that started in 2013, revolutionising the indoor growing market. David joined the team in November 2017 and successfully raised a £7 million series A funding round and total investment to date of £13.8 million. Now, IGS are looking towards global expansion. David will tell us more about the patented technology IGS have created - their TCEA total controlled environment agriculture platform and the Intelligent Grid technology to control environmental elements, including lighting, watering, CO2 levels and nutrient delivery whilst benefitting from significant gains in controls and cost reductions.

Tune in to hear about these cutting-edge technology platforms creating ideal climates for plants and people, here's the conversation between Rob and David.

Learn more about IGS: https://www.intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/
Follow David on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgfarquhar/

This is the first episode of our series of podcasts, focusing on Venture Capital raising. In this episode, we're speaking with our special guest Shubhang Shankar, managing director of Syngenta Ventures and we'll focus on the topic of corporate venture capital for AgTech & FoodTech businesses, explore key investment practices and trends in agrifood tech.

A little bit more about Shubhang - he joined Syngenta Ventures in 2016 based in Basel, Switzerland after having worked for two years in the company’s global strategy team where he was part of the team working on developing Syngenta’s Digital Agriculture strategy. Shubhang looks at companies in a variety of industries of relevance to Syngenta, including Digital / Precision Ag and Biologicals. 

Shubhang is currently an Observer on the Board of Ninjacart, Biophero, Tarfin, and Greeneye Technology.

It's going to be a great discussion, so tune in and enjoy the podcast!

In today's episode, we're speaking with Jim McDougall, Co-Founder and Commercial Director at Outfield.

Outfield enables growers to rapidly image fruit crops with self-flying drones, then receive yield forecasts and productivity maps from a cloud-based machine learning system. 

Jim, along with his co-founder Oli, founded Outfield to make the global fruit industry more productive, more profitable, and more sustainable.  

Jim is Outfield’s Commercial Director and sales lead, engaging with companies and organisations across the fruit and agritech sectors. Before Outfield, Jim worked as a risk consultant advising private equity firms on mergers and acquisitions, with a focus on environmental and social governance. 

Outfield are based in Cambridge, UK and are currently focussed on raising their seed funding round. Enjoy the conversation between Rob and Jim!