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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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Barbara Baarsma is CEO of the newly established Rabo Carbon Bank, an initiative to contribute to a more carbon neutral world on the fundaments of agroforestry. The ambition of the carbon bank is to develop an innovative carbon credits program by measuring the CO2 storage capacity of the planted trees in real time as a base for tradeable credits and a sustainable market place.
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Ruud Barth, founder of SAIA Agrobotics, has a passion for Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Robotics and basically everything that is related to food. After his MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Cum Laude, 2011) from Radboud University, he joined Wageningen University & Research to apply computer vision and robotics to agriculture. There he was Integration Work Package leader within the €11M robotics project ‘Pick&Pack’ and worked on the agrobotics projects ‘CROPS’ and its successor ‘SWEEPER’. Parallel to his work, Ruud obtained a PhD (Cum Laude, 2018) on machine learning based Computer Vision Principles for Harvest Robotics from Wageningen University, in part performed at Harvard University and written down at the California Institute of Technology.
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In 2019 John Brubaker became CEO of Smartwyre. His job is to set the big picture direction, help the group stay pointed to true north, and ensure everyone has the resources they need to get there together.
Read more ›Prior to Smarwyre, John has fulfilled various positions as director business development. He was also CEO of an R&D leader in the discovery and commercialization of small molecule chemistry to improve agricultural yields. he was also briefly a venture partner at Anterra Capital, where he focused on enterprise SaaS opportunities in agribusiness. John is a graduate from Yale University and Johns Hopkins University.
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Anne-Valérie Bach is a seasoned venture capital investor since 2000. In 2019 she became Managing Partner of Capagro, an independent venture capital fund dedicated to agtech and foodtech. She has a passion for entrepreneurs and innovations that make a positive impact on the planet and people. She loves helping entrepreneurs thrive to achieve their visions and dreams.
Read more ›Anne-Valérie spent 12 years with Banexi Ventures, where she focused on hardware, embedded software, communications, and internet start-ups. More recently, she set up a €70M early-stage fund within Serena Capital dedicated to data and AI. During her career, she has helped grow more than 20 companies and has invested over €70M with 3.4x exit returns. Prior to joining the VC industry, she worked as a banker with LCL and BNP Paribas, where she organized several IPOs for tech companies.
Anne-Valérie holds an MBA from the Cass Business School at City, University of London, a B.A. from Brighton Polytechnic and a degree from EDHEC Business School. She is AMF certified. She is a tutor for the HEC Entrepreneurs master’s degree program and for the Lafayette Plug and Play acceleration program.
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Maarten Bosch is at the helm of the Dutch foodtech company Mosa Meat, a company that helps drive the transition from intensive animal agriculture to cellular agriculture. Mosa Meat is widely known for unveiling the world’s first cultured beef burger in 2013. In 2019 Maarten joined the companyto do what he does best, lifting start-ups off the ground and make them grow. But at Mosa Meat his excitement is primarily in making a positive impact on climate change, animal welfare, and food shortage.
Maarten brings a strong commercial sense, and extensive managerial experience, having previously led several larger and fast-growing companies in various consumer electronics businesses. Maarten was involved in several start-ups, successfully attracting resources and lifting them off the ground. Before this, Maarten served as CEO at Optelec (now Vispero), which he grew into the world’s leading manufacturer of assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired. Maarten has a Master’s in Industrial Design Engineering from the Delft University of Technology. He is incredibly excited about the opportunity at Mosa Meat to create an outstanding business, and most importantly to have a huge impact on climate change, food shortage and animal welfare.
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Nicky Deasy is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Yield Lab Europe, overseeing the day to day operations. This includes raising capital, dealing with the limited partners and investors, maintaining and managing a deal pipeline, running the due diligence process and coordinating investments into portfolio companies. She also works to establish accelerator programming and supports those companies with financial mentoring, commercial mentoring and scaling support and overall fund management.
Read more ›Previously Deasy served for 7 years as associate director at KPMG Corporate Finance in Dublin, where she ran the food and beverage M&A team before moving to Ernst & Young to set up a corporate finance practice for EY’s regional offices as director of corporate finance. After 5 years in that role, Deasy left to run her own corporate finance practice. She was a mentor to the EI HPSU, through which she assisted companies going to market to raise equity. She has worked with many early-stage companies across a variety of sectors to raise seed and Series A equity capital, having advised on rounds totaling hundreds of millions of dollars over her 20-year career. She has extensive links with the venture capital and business communities in both Dublin and Galway, Ireland.
Deasy graduated at the top of her class from Trinity College Dublin with a bachelor’s degree in business in 1995, and she came in fifth place in Ireland in the finals of the chartered accountancy exams in 1999.
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Ayca Dundar Ayca is an internationally award-wining Turkish industrial designer and inventor-entrepreneur based in Cambridge, UK. With her company SoluBlue she aims to extend shelf-life with hyper-biodegradable, seaweed-based packaging.
Read more ›Ayca Dundar is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (London) and Middle East Technical University (Ankara). Her design approach is driven by innovation, sustainability, and the desire to exploit new and emerging material properties. She has a keen interest in mechanisms, structure, textile morphologies and how materials behave.
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As an experienced entrepreneur and CEO, Dominic Edmunds has built a wealth of commercial knowledge through founding and managing his own data business before entering into the world of EO analysis and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). In 2020 he became the CEO of PlanetWatchers.
Read more ›Having secured recognition from Glassdoor and Business Insider for running the UK’s best technology company to work for (2015), Dominic was also recognized by the Sunday Times ‘Tech Track’, Sunday Times ‘Export Track’ & The London Stock Exchange – ‘Companies to inspire Britain’. At PlanetWatchers, Dominic is turning months of manual claims adjustment into just minutes of automated analysis across the insurance industry… and having a lot fun along the way.
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As a passionate food scientist, Michelle looks to combat global food security and malnutrition in everything she does. She has expertise in dairy fermentation, formulation, and processing and is thrilled to ditch the cows for humans. Inspired by upstream solutions for infant nutrition at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she became obsessed with advancing human nutrition through better infant feeding options.
Michelle seeks to harness the capacity to drive environmental and social change through creative food solutions with a consumer-first design. Her entrepreneurial expertise in social impact and sustainable business models drives her commitment to seeking mission-aligned partners.
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Hanneke Faber is a global business leader, brand builder and tech innovator with 25+ years of international experience in the FMCG and (e)retail industries. On 1 May 2019, Hanneke was appointed President, Foods & Refreshment at Unilever. In this role she is responsible for Unilever’s ice cream, tea and Foods categories globally, including Unilever Food Solutions. Read more ›
Hanneke spent most of her career in the FMCG and retail industry. Prior to joining Unilever, she worked at Royal Ahold Delhaize as Chief E-commerce and Innovation Officer, and member of the Executive Committee playing a key role in accelerating the company’s e-commerce business. Between 2013 and 2016, she was Chief Commercial Officer & Member of the Executive Committee of Royal Ahold responsible for e-commerce, digital, innovation and customer branding.
Hanneke started her career at Procter & Gamble where she became Vice President and global leader of three of P&G’s top brands with a presence in over 180 countries. Hanneke holds a Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Business Administration from the University of Houston in the US.
Since 2016 she serves as a member of Bayer AG’s Supervisory Board. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Leading Executives Advancing Diversity (LEAD Network).
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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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Paul Gambill is the CEO and co-founder of Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. Nori partners with suppliers who sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and operates a market selling those carbon removals to companies who are negating their carbon footprints. In 2015, Paul established the first known community dedicated to carbon removal. He has over a decade of experience in software product management for clients including Nike, Showtime, Target, and Starbucks.
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Ken Giller is Professor Plant Production Systems, within WaCASA (the Wageningen Centre for Agroecology and Systems Analysis) at Wageningen University & Research. Ken’s research has focused on smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular problems of soil fertility and the role of nitrogen fixation in tropical legumes, with emphasis on the temporal and spatial dynamics of resources within crop/livestock farming systems and their interactions.
Read more ›Ken is author of the standard text Nitrogen Fixation in Tropical Cropping Systems published in second edition in 2001. He leads a number of initiatives such as N2Africa (Putting Nitrogen Fixation to Work for Smallholder Farmers in Africa). He joined Wageningen University in 2001 after holding professorships at Wye College, University of London, and the University of Zimbabwe.
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Andrew D. Ive managing general partner of Big Idea Ventures. He created the company to solve the world’s biggest challenges by supporting the world’s best entrepreneurs. Andrew has invested in more early-stage / pre-seed food companies than any other investor worldwide.
Read more ›Andrew serves on the Advisory Board for Tufts Nutrition Council, is a Friedman School Entrepreneurship advisor, previously served on the Small Business Council of the Department of Trade and Industry advising the UK Government on entrepreneurship and high growth companies. A Harvard Business School graduate and Procter & Gamble brand management trained.
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Napala Pratini is the growth-expert and co-founder of Habitual, a company using innovations in digital cures and tested weight loss methods to deliver personalized weight-loss treatments. She’s both Fullbright Scholar and Oxford graduate with an extensive background as a growth and marketing consultant to leading companies across the US and UK. Examples of companies she’s helped include Plaid, Hired, and the world’s leading luxury department store, Harrods.
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Nusqe Spanton, Founder and CEO of Australian biotech company Provectus Algae, is an algae and aquaculture expert with 17 years experience in international aquaculture production, corporate management and marine biotechnology applications for public and private companies. Passionate and motivated leader with a proven track record in complex project delivery.
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Julia Streuli is co-founder & CEO of FUL Foods. She joined forces with her other two co-founders during an MBA at INSEAD, where their work emerged after engaging with over 100 startups, investors, and NGOs to address the massive challenge of feeding our growing planet by 2050 while combating climate change. Through a proprietary biorefinery of sustainably grown microalgae, FUL has developed a trademarked planet positive protein-rich ingredient – FUL® – that addresses key issues around taste, solubility, stability and bio assimilation.
Read more ›Prior to co-founding FUL Foods, Julia helped launch and scale a for-profit for-good venture-backed technology startup in Silicon Valley where she built the company’s sales and marketing strategy – partnering with global corporates such as Cisco, Dropbox and VMware, as well as leading strategic product partnerships with NGOs and foundations. Along the way, Julia also co-founded a nonprofit project on effective philanthropy, and worked on health education initiatives in the U.S. and Thailand.
Julia has a B.A. from Brown University in international development/gender studies and an MBA from INSEAD where she met her FUL co-founders to launch a blog and research initiative on innovations in the sustainable food sector.
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Béla Jankovich de Jeszenice is active on the crossroads of agriculture, the environment and technical and social innovation. He is leading the operations of the family estate in Hungary. In addition, Béla is Chair of non-profit organization Commonland, founded to support restoration of 100 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2040. Béla is an active investor, advisor to Anterra Capital and Board member of AgroVIR Kft, a regional leader in farm management software.
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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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As founder and managing partner of Blue Horizon Ventures, Michael Kleindl is running its investment team. He is an experienced business angel and venture capital investor, serial entrepreneur and successful founder of a multitude of digital businesses during the last 20 years, including some early Food Tech investments.
Read more ›Michael holds a University degree from European Business School and his track record includes 2 IPOs and numerous exits of portfolio companies’ to prestigious buyers such as Amazon, Axel Springer, Deutsche Post DHL, Eventbrite, Just Eat.
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Kees Kruythoff is a Dutch entrepreneur who has been at the helm of numerous different companies. For 27 years, he worked for Unilever. The last 8 years he was part of the global Unilever Executive team, first as President North America and following that, as President for the Global Home Care division. Currently, he is Chairman & CEO of The LiveKindly Collective. Kees is committed to building solutions that create a more sustainable and equitable world.
Read more ›Kees is passionate about the private sector as a force for good, and was proud to lead the implementation of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which was recognized as one of the 10 most prominent business leaders in Brazil in sustainability. He left Unilever in the middle of 2019 and became part of the founding team of IMAGINE. A for-benefit business and foundation, IMAGINE helps shift global industries to combat climate change and inequality.
At the beginning of 2020, Kees became the chairman and CEO of The Livekindly Collective. The company is made up of plant-based food brands (Fry’s Family Foods, Oumph!, LikeMeat, and No Meat), as well as Livekindly Media. The intent is to build the pre-eminent global plant-based food company and make plant-based living the new norm.
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Matt Marshall is Senior Director Corporate Strategy at Nutrien. The company developed a comprehensive carbon program that will help growers integrate the use of sustainable agronomic practices (including collection of farm and field-level data to reliably measure carbon and other sustainability outcomes) into their farm planning process by using Nutrien’s digital platform. At the end of the season, carbon outcomes will be verified using industry accepted standards, generating carbon credits available for purchase by Nutrien, other value-chain partners and cross-industry buyers, generating incremental profit for growers.
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Alexandra (Ali) Morrow is part of Astanor’s founding team, joining as Investment Principal in 2017. She invests across the food and agriculture value chain to seed a food system that is regenerative, nourishing, ultra fresh and trusted. At Astanor, she is responsible for portfolio strategy, impact investment thesis and measurement.
Read more ›Ali has a strong strategic and creative background, with her past work spanning innovation in food system economics and social impact. Previously, Ali led strategy at the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation, was a strategic planning director at global advisory and advertising firms’ the Brunswick Group and JWT, leading JWT’s social impact and innovation practice, JWTethos and was an investigative journalist with the Thomas Reuters Foundation, focusing on climate change, food security and adaptation.
Ali’s work has earned her a People’s Voice Webby Award (2010), Gold Digital Market Award from Marketing Magazine (2010) and Interactive Award from Applied Arts (2009). She is actively involved in the agriculture and food startup ecosystem in Europe and serves as a mentor with Copenhagen and Amsterdam-based agrifoodtech accelerator and fund, RockStart. Ali is currently a Kauffman Fellow, part of class 25.
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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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Tom Peeters is co-founder & CEO of Crisp. Launched in 2018, Crisp is the supermarket-app that brings better food, delivering fresh, seasonal and affordable products from hundreds of independent producers to families all over the Netherlands. With an award-winning brand, exponential growth and a team of 500+, Crisp is building the fundament for a category winner in the largest consumer industry.
Read more ›Before Crisp, Tom was co-founder of ecommerce company Westwing (IPO in Frankfurt in 2018). Prior to Westwing, Tom worked in London as M&A advisor, and as a student he co-founded the Restaurant Week. He is a passionate entrepreneur and leader of people, highly driven to build something that matters.
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Alexander Ribbink is General Partner at Keen Ventures Partners. He has over 20 years of experience in worked extensively in fast moving consumer goods and technology industries. Key areas of functional expertise include branding, international growth and market entry, innovation and strategy.
Read more ›Before joining Keen Venture Partners Alexander was a general partner at Prime Ventures, where he invested in and served as board member of, among others, Takeaway.com. Prior to Prime, he was board member and Chief Operating Officer of TomTom, the personal navigation company. He lead the international expansion of TomTom and was part of the leadership team that IPO-ed the company. Before his time at TomTom he held a number of senior directors’ psitions at MARS Inc. and Unilever NV. Alexander holds an MA degree in Law from the University of Amsterdam and an MBA degree from the Rotterdam School of Management.
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Hadar Sutovsky is VP External Innovation at ICL group, one of the top tier corporates in the field of agriculture, food and engineered materials. She is dedicated to establishing and managing the ICL PLANET Startup Hub, which is the vehicle which ICL choose to invest and work with innovative companies, in the domains of crop nutrition and food, to synergize with their novelty and to short-cut their way to global play.
Read more ›Before joining ICL, Hadar was Managing Partner in Aquagro Fund, a dedicated impact investment management firm that seeks to generate strong financial returns by deploying capital in game changing technology companies addressing critical global needs in the fields of smart agriculture, food and water. Among her responsibilities, she implemented impact investments strategies to the Aquagro Group.
Along her professional path Hadar lead Innovation scouting in areas of AgriFood & Sustainability for the Global Unilever Open Innovation Hub, she was Global Segment Manager and Corporate Open Innovation Leader at Frutarom, a global leader of flavors and fine ingredients for the foodtech industry and the 2nd largest Israeli “exit,” of approximately $7.1 billion.
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Wilco Schoonderbeek is lead Scale-up & Innovation at Invest NL. For almost two decades he has supported companies manage their risks and capture their potential using technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. He has done this from many sides of the table: corporate, SME, investor or advisor. He has been active in fundraising, has been leading investment opportunities through various stages of the process, including sourcing, initial screening, due-diligence, structuring, execution, closure and portfolio management.
Read more ›After many years of passionate work in public and private sector and a number of investments in disruptive innovations Wilco feels he is uniquely positioned to provide guidance in managing challenges and understand the profound changes that will be ushered by advances in technology.
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With Scaleupnation, Anieke Wierenga helps scale young, innovative ventures in Food and Agriculture, Mobility, and Health-tech. They focus on enterprises that really punch beyond their weight: impact scale-ups. In other words, innovative, for-profit businesses that have disproportionate potential to change the world for the better, add new employment and create economic value. Anieke combines more than 20 years hands-on experience in innovation strategy and execution (Corbion, Unilever and Schlumberger), innovation consultancy and innovation governance with a PhD in Chemistry (Utrecht, 1997), a Masters degree in Advanced Change Methodologies (SIOO, 2011) and an education in Corporate Governance (ESAA 2020).