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Adam Anders is managing partner at Anterra Capital. Adam has over 15 years experience in private equity and venture capital, having entered the sector as a senior operational executive for several venture capital funded businesses. Adam has held senior roles at Rabobank including as a director of Rabobank Private Equity and the managing director of Rabo Ventures.
Read more ›Prior to this Adam was with Ironbridge Capital, a Private Equity house in Sydney, Australia. Earlier in his career Adam worked as a management consultant with Bain & Co and as a commercial lawyer.
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Corjan van den Berg is co-founder of FUMI Ingredients. FUMI Ingredients develops functional food ingredients from microorganisms. The novel animal-free ingredients work as egg replacers and have no allergens. The production process allows a carbon footprint reduction of over 90% compared to conventional egg-white production.
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Jochem Bossenbroek is co-founder and CEO of Verdify. Verdify enables companies active in the food domain to personalise their recipes for individual customers, supporting prevention and treatment of chronic diseases. Their digital platform fully personalizes meal recipes according to guideline-based medical diets, biomarkers and individual preferences.
Read more ›Jochem is strongly driven to create opportunities for healthcare and prevention through entrepreneurship. He is co-founder and CEO of Verdi Food since 2017 – aimed at unlocking the potential of personalized nutrition. He was CEO of Dutch biotech company BunyaVax that develops breakthrough vaccine technology from 2017 to 2019. In 2009 Jochem co-founded the life sciences consultancy firm ttopstart and was partner of the company for seven years. Creative thinking, problem solving and strategy building are Jochem’s favorite topics. Social impact is his main driver.
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Gilles Boumeester is global head of Rabobank’s RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness department. Gilles manages a team of 80 people around the globe. Gilles joined Rabobank in 1997 and held several commercial management roles in Utrecht before he was appointed Regional Head of North-East Asia, based in Hong Kong, in 2007. In 2010 he returned to the Netherlands as global head F&A Coverage.
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Alon Chen is CEO and Co-founder of Tastewise, a consumer intelligence platform for Food Marketing and Product Innovation. Previously, Alan was a Google executive who founded and ran Google Partners program in 27 markets, led Google’s relationship with the World Economic Forum and was Google’s CMO for Israel and Greece. Most recently he worked at Voyager Labs ($100M backing from Oracle and Horizons) incepting and driving their eCommerce division.
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Nicholas Fereday is executive director in Rabobank’s research department in New York, specializing in food and consumer trends. Prior to joining Rabobank, he was a senior economist and VP sales & marketing for LMC International, an economic agri-food consultancy company. Before that he worked for the Natural Resources Institute in the UK, The Department of Agriculture in Papua New Guinea (courtesy of the Overseas Development Institute) and was also a journalist for The Economist Intelligence Unit.
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Jayce Hafner is co-founder and CEO of FarmRaise. FarmRaise unlocks public and private funding for farmers through cataloguing each grower’s unique options and simplifying the funding application process. FarmRaise makes it easy for farmers to invest in their operations today and steward their assets for future generations.
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Kirk Haney is the CEO and managing partner of Radicle Growth, a $15M accelerator fund focused on transforming the speed of innovation in agriculture. Under Kirk’s leadership, Radicle secured top tier financial and corporate investors including Bayer Crop Science, Nutrien, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer. Radicle is partnering with great entrepreneurs to bring disruptive innovation to market while leveraging the platform’s global network to accelerate the development of the new technologies.
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Rens de Jong is a well-known speaker, event host and moderator in the Dutch business sector. He has the ability to increase the energy and enthusiasm in the room by connecting the audience. People in the audience described him as very energetic, witty and well-prepared. In 2013, Quote magazine named Rens one of the most popular event-moderators in The Netherlands. In 2014 he was nominated for “The day’s chairman of the year”. His specializations are innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship and human capital. All in all a great host and moderator for F&A Next.
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Coline Laurent is marketing & communications manager of Connecting Food. Connecting Food tracks and digitally audits food products in real-time from farm to fork. The blockchain solution maps food supply chains and improve internal traceability. They also help brands and retailers improve their external transparency via a QR code & storytelling.
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Rob is a founding partner at AgFunder. AgFunder one of the world’s most active foodtech and agtech venture capital firms. Rob is a Forbes contributor and has also been published in TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, Financial Post, and twice in Nature journals. Rob has been invited to chair, speak, and keynote at many global conferences on food & agriculture, technology, and fintech.
Read more ›In 2014, Forbes Magazine named Rob to their list of ‘Up-And-Comers’, and the White House has extended special invitations to White House-sponsored events. He’s a judge for the National Ag Innovation Prize, the Verizon’s $6M IoT Award for 2015, and sits on the advisory committee of the Ag Innovation Showcase, the world’s first and longest-running AgTech conference.
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As a managing director at Temasek , Anuj is part of the leadership team that makes investments in agri-food companies globally and helps these companies unlock their potential. Anuj strongly believes that science and technology led solutions are the panacea to problems such as undernutrition, malnutrition, water scarcity and climate change.
Read more ›Anuj started his investment career in 2004 as one of the first employees at Temasek’s first overseas office (Mumbai). Since then he has had multiple different roles in the firm including building our Middle East & Africa franchise – an important geopolitical region with exciting prospects but many unsolved problems. He serves on the board of Tana Africa Holdings, a investment company focus in food, consumer sectors.
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Keren Mimran is founder and VP business development & marketing at Edete. Edete offers a high-efficiency artificial pollination service solution for companies and growers. By reducing the deficiencies of erratic and dwindling insect-based pollination, Edete’s controlled and manageable solution has been proven to increase the yield of almond orchards.
Read more ›Keren brings over 10 years of startup management and entrepreneurship and over 15 years of management consulting. She has extensive experience in driving initiatives, new ideas, and technologies to revenue generating businesses, fundraising and investor relations.
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David Morgan is president of Pebble Labs. Pebble Labs develops solutions to safely and sustainably increase natural crop yield and food security. Its mission is to develop breakthrough disruptive technologies that address the greatest agricultural, aquaculture, and environmental challenges facing the globe.
Read more ›David has more than 30 years of senior leadership experience in agricultural and biotechnology sectors. As a global head at Syngenta AG he was responsible for operational and strategic management of the Vegetables Business Unit operating in over 75 countries. Prior, he was president of Syngenta Seeds Inc. in North America, and regional head: Seeds, Syngenta Asia Pacific.
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Sean O’Keefe is founder of COGZ. COGZ offers a B2B online marketplace for food & beverage manufacturers and processors to buy surplus produce directly from farmers and growers. COGZ’s technology saves time, increases profitability and prevents food waste in primary production. Sean is an experienced commercial director who is currently building his second startup within Food Tech.
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Rickard Öste is founder of the oat milk Oatly. Rickard has over 25 years experience of senior research and development in both academic and commercial contexts. His work focus both basic and applied food chemistry and nutrition. He has over 100 publications, including original contributions, reviews and popular science as well as patents that are currently being industrially exploited.
Read more ›Recently he and colleagues with oat interests and relevant scientific knowledge started CropTailor AB, a company devoted to the development of new, unique oat varieties using molecular biology.
Rickard Öste is now leading the development of new products and patents within the food sector and within medical diagnostics from the research company Aventure AB. In addition, he is part time professor at the department of applied nutrition at Lund University in southern Sweden.
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Wieland Reichert is CEO of Evologic Technologies. Evologic Technologies produces microbial bioactives (biostimulants and biopesticides) for seed distributors, thanks to its proprietary production platform technology. This allows distributors sell an upgraded product to farmers.
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Vipula Shakula is senior program officer Agriculture at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She currently leads the Discovery investment portfolio linking upstream, breakthrough science to application in agriculture for smallholder farmers. Prior to joining the foundation, Vipula spent more than a decade at Dow AgroSciences, where she helped establish and build their biotechnology research division and led numerous research programs that delivered novel genes, traits and pioneering genome-editing technology for crops. She also held roles in technology investment, licensing and commercialization, collaboration and IP portfolio management. Vipula is an inventor on numerous patents and her research has been published in high-profile scientific journals such as Science and Nature.
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Sam Smith-Eppsteiner is a partner at Innovation Endeavors. When it comes to investing, Sam gravitates toward ideas that leverage emerging technology, growing datasets, and accelerating learning cycles to improve real-world infrastructure. She’s interested in transportation, logistics, construction, and food & agriculture. Sam is eager to partner with founders who are taking new approaches to alleviate some of humanity’s most difficult challenges in these spaces. She has experience across multiple industries, from grocery to semiconductors to agriculture, and wide-ranging functions, from product development and market research to pricing to sales strategy.
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Sheila Struyck is venture partner at Shift Invest. Sheila has a strong interest in healthy and nutricious food and co-founded a dedicated hospital. Her strong network and background in the FMCG sector together with her experience as an entrepreneur make her a valuable partner to make consumer market oriented companies flourish. She is always end-user and NPS focused, since that is proven to drive profitable growth.
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Robbert de Vreede is executive vice president Global Foods at Unilever. He describes himself as a passionate business-driven marketer with 20 years of FMCG experience, various marketing and sales roles across a variety of markets across Europe and Africa. He likes to drive change and unleash the energy inside people and businesses, by taking calculated risks so people and businesses can grow faster. He is a strong believer that multi-functional teams deliver better results.