agritech
(6)Satish Vemuri
Satish Vemuri is the CEO of ëko Incorporated, a New York-based venture that stitches urban farms into the real estate that hosts them - matching developers, architects, biologists, and agriculture specialists to grow food for the restaurants and shops downstairs. He studied Finance and Economics at NYU Stern with a math minor, and he tends to reach for spreadsheets and mathematical models before making a call on how the company should move.
James Paterson
James Paterson is the co-founder and CEO of Aerobotics, a Cape Town-based precision agriculture company that turns drone and satellite imagery into AI-powered, tree-by-tree insights for fruit and nut growers. Raised on a family citrus farm and trained as a mechatronics engineer at the University of Cape Town before a masters at MIT, Paterson pairs first-hand farming instinct with aerospace-grade robotics. Since founding Aerobotics with Benji Meltzer in 2014, he has grown it into a global player that now analyzes a large share of the Florida citrus crop and has raised roughly $30 million, insisting the company is 'a farming company, enabled by technology' rather than a tech company that dabbles in farming.
Francisco Mere
Francisco Meré is the founder and CEO of Blooms, a financial-technology company that gives Latin American fruit and vegetable exporters fast working capital, cross-border factoring, and multi-currency payments so their produce can reach North American shelves. A lawyer-turned-banker-turned-builder, he previously co-founded Bankaool, Mexico's first fully digital bank, ran the agricultural development bank FIRA, and chaired Mexico's fintech association. With Blooms he is chasing a multibillion-dollar financing gap that keeps growers cash-poor even as demand for fresh produce booms.
Georg Caspary
Georg Caspary is the founder and CEO of HarvestAi, a Potsdam-based deeptech company that uses machine learning and computer vision to forecast harvest dates and yields in commercial greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. A former World Bank economist and fundraising lead with degrees from Oxford, the LSE, Sciences-Po Paris and MIT, he spent two decades on environmental and agricultural finance across more than 20 countries before turning his attention to the unglamorous but high-stakes problem of knowing exactly how many tomatoes a greenhouse will produce, and when. HarvestAi has raised over $3 million, won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush, and runs pilots in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
Saar Safra
Saar Safra is the CEO and Co-founder of Beewise, the company behind the BeeHome - the world's first AI-powered autonomous robotic beehive. A serial entrepreneur with three prior exits, Safra pivoted from digital advertising tech to saving the global food supply when he returned to Israel and met a beekeeper who asked a deceptively simple question: could a computer do this better? Since founding Beewise in 2018, the company has deployed 1,240+ robotic beehives pollinating over 300,000 acres annually, raised nearly $170M in total funding including a $50M Series D in June 2025, and earned Safra a spot on Forbes' 2025 Sustainability Leaders list.
Roger Salameh
Roger Salameh is a General Partner at Swanlaab Venture Factory's AgriFood Fund I, bringing over 30 years of hands-on agribusiness and biotechnology leadership to the venture world. A veteran of Monsanto, Calgene, and Arcadia Biosciences - where he served as interim CEO and then COO - Salameh now deploys capital into early-stage agri-food tech startups from his perch in Napa, California, while simultaneously running DnA Advisory Services, a consultancy helping AgTech and FoodTech companies navigate the path from innovation to commercialization.