Luminexus

Anie Akpe | African Women in Tech (AWIT) | IBOMLLC | Innov8tiv

Silicon valley (and the rest of the world) get’s caught up in the ‘next big thing’. The next big technology or breakthrough, weather that be blockchain, web3 or NFTs. Founders and investors alike chase these technologies in hopes of mining some of the metaphorical gold that each technology brings.

But what if the real gold lies right in front of investors eyes? It’s not a flashy new technology or complicated scientific breakthrough - it’s diversity. Could different ethnicities, races, cultures, genders and backgrounds provide a new perspective among founders that could drive an even larger impact then the next big tech could?

Anie Akpe, founder of African Women In Tech says that the answer to this question is yes. Currently, less than 0.7% of all VC funding goes to female black founders, and Anie is on a mission to raise this number by empowering African women to unlock their full potential in technology, through mentorship, workshops, hackathons and more.

Here’s why diversity is more important than the next big technology.

Matthew Espinoza | Agora Labs

Out of the many tech buzz words that have been gaining attention in the media lately, Web3 and blockchain are the two biggest.

So in this episode of the Luminexus podcast we talk with Matt Espinoza, a web3 and blockchain developer, and founder and CEO of Agora Labs. This conversation is designed perfectly for someone with no knowledge of web3/blockchain to become familiar with the basics of how each technology work. Think of this episode like a workshop to take you from 0 to 1 in web3 and blockchain, and open your eyes to practical use cases of both technologies apart from just NFTs. (And how NFTs could be used to make a big impact as well.)

Laura Boykin | Cassava Virus Action Project

The whitefly is a deadly pest that destroys close to half the total yields in Africa. Take the cassava plant for example, a staple crop that 800 million people rely on for their daily calories. The whitefly transmits diseases that kill the cassava, like cassava mosaic disease, and cassava brown streak disease.

This is what we call on the Luminexus Podcast a “non obvious problem.” The problem of pests destroying the majority of cassava plants leaves millions of farmers with low yields to sell, no food to put away for the winter, contributing to an endless poverty loop.

Today we talk with Dr.Laura Boykin, whose research and work is about solving this problem. She has spent her life studying the evolution of whiteflies and the viruses they transmit, and she has mapped the genome of the cassava whitefly to better understand how it works.

Now, Laura is the founder of the Cassava Virus Action Project, where she works with small scale farmers in Sub Saharan Africa to teach them how to use genomic sequencing devices to catch infestations of the whitefly early on. In this conversation, we talk about the problem of the whitefly in Sub Saharan Africa, intergenerational poverty that stems from agriculture, and Laura’s research with genomic sequencing devices to give farmers the tools to detect and stop infestations of the whitefly.

Eva Goulbourne | ReFED website | Littlefoot Ventures

In the USA, 35% of all food produced ends up in the dump. This is 90 billion meals worth of food annually, equaling out to the same climate footprint as the entire U.S aviation industry. When I first learned these facts my mind was blown. All I could think about was why do we let this happen?

So to answer this question, we break down the problem of food waste and food loss with the World Economic’s Forum food waste/loss expert, Eva Goulburne. We run through a route cause analysis exercise to break down the problem, and understand different route causes. We follow the journey of a little potato from seed to table, and all the possible places throughout this system where out little potato will get wasted. And we also explore solutions that have been implemented, and ways that these solutions have been sucessfull, but also how they have failed.

This is a classic Luminexus episode, where we spend an hour connecting the dots between the route causes of a problem and failed solutions, and come out the end of our conversation with more clarity and understanding about why the problem exists, and what we need to do about it to help address the problem.

Shely Aronov | InnerPlant

"If you don't try, you fail. And if you want to succeed, you at least have a chance by trying. If you try enough times and have the right team to support you, the right attitude, and the right mentors, you might actually change the world.” - Shely Aronov

These are the kinds of knowledge bombs Shely drops in this conversation. Shely is the co founder and CEO of InnerPlant, a company combing AI, drone technology and gene editing to detect pest infestations on crops in real time. They genetically engineer the plant to fluoresce under certain external conditions (like a pest is attacking them), and this fluorescence is detected by drones in the sky which sends the data to the InnerPlant app to alert farmers immediently. With this approach, every single plant can be individually cared for, and specific nutrients, water, fertilizer and pesticides can be tailored to every single plant instead of entire fields.

In this conversation we talk with Shely about the importance of agriculture, and the big problems with our agricultural system that must be addressed to feed our growing population. We talk about Shely’s path to founding InnerPlant, and the technicalities of how InnerPlant operates. And we wrap up our conversation with Shely’s take on the mindsets of a changemakers, and skills all changemakers should equip themselves with if they want to make an impact in the world.