Egor Kirin

Egor Kirin runs Agro.Club, a full-stack B2B marketplace that sits in the middle of one of the oldest and least digitized businesses on the planet: the buying, selling, and moving of grain. The platform connects input manufacturers - the companies that make seed, crop protection, and animal nutrition products - with the distributors and farmers who use them, and links grain buyers to an efficient way to source their supply. Woven through it is a layer of fintech: factoring, invoice financing, and credit that make each transaction more secure and less costly.

The company operates in the three largest agricultural markets - Europe, South America, and North America - and is headquartered on Avenue of the Americas in New York. Kirin describes the underlying problem plainly: the grain supply chain is extremely messy and operational, still run in many places on phone calls, spreadsheets, and paperwork. Agro.Club's bet is that software and embedded finance can make it more transparent, efficient, and sustainable.

That mission is not abstract to him. Kirin points to a projection from the World Resources Institute that the world will need roughly 56% more food by 2050, and frames agtech as one of the few realistic levers to close that gap. "Be able to adapt easily," he has said of the sector. "The agricultural industry is very conservative but not static."

Nine years on the inside

Kirin did not arrive at agriculture as an outsider looking for a market to disrupt. He spent nearly a decade at Monsanto, now part of Bayer, starting as a business analyst in 2009 and rising to lead crop protection and business operations across Europe and the Middle East while still in his late twenties. From that vantage point he watched inefficiencies pile up across the value chain in country after country - the kind of friction that insiders learn to work around and outsiders never see.

In 2017 he moved to fertilizer producer EuroChem as Head of Marketing. A year later, at 31, he left the corporate world entirely to start Agro.Club. It was a deliberate trade: a secure executive seat for the uncertainty of building a company from nothing. "Without self-belief," he has said, "I would not have built a successful corporate career or a profitable global business."

The 100-pitch habit

The early days of Agro.Club produced the kind of stories founders tell years later. Kirin approached one crucial early customer more than 100 times before they finally signed on. During the company's first international grain transactions, his logistics team worked until 4 a.m. two nights running to make sure a vessel loaded without a hitch. Persistence, in his telling, is less a trait than a repeated decision.

It is a theme he returns to often. He draws on Michael Jordan's view of failure as the raw material of success, and cites Ray Dalio's Principles as a formative influence on how he runs the company. His own version is blunter: "There are always reasons to win, and there are always excuses to lose. You choose." And on doubt: "Losers swim in the ocean of self-pity; winners take control and move forward."

Building where others hesitate

By 2021 the work had started to compound. Agro.Club raised $5M to accelerate the international expansion of its cloud-based agriculture solutions with embedded finance, and CropLife Magazine named it one of the best agriculture apps of the year. Kirin, a member of the Forbes Business Council, counts building a profitable global company from scratch among the achievements he is most proud of - a notable line in a sector where many startups burn cash chasing scale.

He is candid about the cost. Entrepreneurial life, he says, demands round-the-clock commitment and a high tolerance for stress, and part of the job is learning to let go quickly - of underperforming projects and, when necessary, of people. He also learned to pick his teammates for shared values, not just skills. Asked about risk, his answer is short: "I'd rather try and fail than regret not trying."

The larger ambition behind Agro.Club is straightforward and, if it works, consequential: use technology to connect the global agricultural value chain so that the grain supply becomes more secure, efficient, and sustainable. It is a long game in an industry that measures change in growing seasons. Kirin seems comfortable with that. "There are always reasons to win," he says, "and there are always excuses to lose."