regenerative-agriculture
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Nicks Ericsson
Nicks Ericsson is the Chief Marketing Officer of KEEN Footwear, the Portland-based outdoor shoe company, a role he took on in 2024. A Swedish-trained brand marketer with more than 20 years across fashion, sport, and footwear, he spent over a decade at UGG, where he built the brand's first circular-economy program and pushed its regenerative-agriculture pledge across a million acres of farmland. Earlier he helped scale premium labels including J.Lindeberg and Justin Timberlake's William Rast, and he co-founded The AND Agency to advise companies on responsible brand and sustainability strategy. His stated aim at KEEN is to make it 'the most trusted brand in the world' through consistency and transparency rather than moonshot promises.
Steve Sibulkin
Steve Sibulkin is the CEO and board member of BioLumic, a New Zealand-and-US agtech company that uses precise UV light signals to switch on genetic traits in seeds without genetic modification. A repeat CEO with a background bridging advertising strategy and agriculture, he earlier co-founded and led Agronomic Technology Corp, maker of the Adapt-N nitrogen tool, which was acquired by fertilizer giant Yara International. He now leads BioLumic's push to commercialize xTraits, light-programmed seed traits it says can cut years and up to 90% of the cost out of traditional trait development across corn, soybean, rice and forage.
Emily Stone
Emily Stone is the founder and CEO of Uncommon Cacao, the first specialty cacao trader to publish verifiable prices for every transaction along its supply chain. From a base that started in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, she built a Transparent Trade model that sources from more than 10,000 smallholder farmers across 15+ countries and supplies hundreds of craft chocolate makers worldwide. An Ashoka Fellow and Georgetown-trained sociologist, she is trying to decommoditize cacao by making farmers the protagonists of the chain rather than its afterthought.
Jayce Hafner
Jayce Hafner is the co-founder and CEO of FarmRaise, a farm financial software startup that turns the maze of USDA paperwork and cash-flow tracking into something a farmer can finish on a phone in minutes. A cattle farmer's daughter from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, she spent years in environmental policy - lobbying Congress, organizing UN climate delegations, and working on Apple's sustainability team - before deciding that real change in agriculture would come from tools, not talk. She holds an MS in agriculture and an MBA, both from Stanford, and has grown FarmRaise past 20,000 farmers on a mission to make farming more profitable, resilient, and equitable.
Alex Abelin
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.
Taylor Zehren
Taylor Zehren is the co-founder and CEO of Wasted* PBC, a Vermont public benefit corporation building the circular sanitation economy by turning human waste into fertilizer. A biochemist and public health researcher turned climate entrepreneur, she leads a company that operates hundreds of urine-diverting toilets across New England and sells WeeBloom, a powdered fertilizer derived from human urine. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list in 2023 and has raised over $7.5M for the venture.
Harrison Yoon
Harrison Yoon is the CEO of Kula Bio, a Massachusetts agbiotech company turning supercharged nitrogen-fixing microbes into a low-emission alternative to synthetic fertilizer. A chemical engineer by training with a Cornell postdoc and more than 25 years across cell culture, microbial fermentation and bioprocess engineering, he joined Kula Bio in 2020 as President and COO and stepped up to CEO in November 2025 as the company closed its Series A-1 round and launched shelf-stable products into farmers' fields.
Julia Collins
Julia Collins is the founder and CEO of Planet FWD, a San Francisco climate-intelligence software company that helps consumer brands measure and cut the carbon footprint of their products. She is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn (Zume Pizza, valued at $2.25B), a three-time food-industry founder, and the creator of Moonshot Snacks, the climate-friendly cracker brand acquired by Patagonia Provisions in 2023. Planet FWD turns life-cycle assessments and Scope 1/2/3 inventories into decarbonization roadmaps for brands from Cava to Everlane.
Kurt Tsuo
Kurt Tsuo is the Chief Business Officer of Varaha, a Gurugram-based carbon removal company building high-integrity credits with smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. A Harvard-trained economist who spent seven years in agriculture before it was a climate headline, he has built business lines at the Gates Foundation, Farmer's Business Network, ProducePay, and Breakthrough Energy, and co-founded the carbon storage startup Graphyte. His through-line is unglamorous and stubborn: make the economics of fixing carbon work for the people who actually grow food.
Nick Wiseman
Nick Wiseman is the co-founder and CEO of Little Sesame, a Washington, D.C. born hummus company that grew from a 500-square-foot restaurant basement into a national consumer brand sold in nearly 3,000 stores. A third-generation Washingtonian who started cooking at 15 and trained on New York's fine-dining line, Wiseman built Little Sesame with chef Ronen Tenne and cousin David Wiseman, anchoring the brand to regeneratively grown organic chickpeas from Montana. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.5M Series A to fund a new 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and a push to convert 10,000 acres to regenerative farming by 2027.
Hana Kajimura
Hana Kajimura is the CEO of Trellis Group, the climate media-and-events company behind GreenBiz, Circularity and Trellis Impact. Before running the room, she built it: as Allbirds' first full-time sustainability hire she stamped a carbon footprint on every shoe, open-sourced the methodology so rival brands could copy it, and authored the 'Flight Plan' to halve the company's per-product emissions. A Stanford environmental scientist who chose business over activism because companies 'move much more swiftly,' she now runs the largest gathering of sustainability professionals in North America.
Paul Schiefer
Paul Schiefer is the CEO of Amy's Kitchen, the family-founded organic frozen food maker in Petaluma, California. He started on the canning line as a high-school intern, then spent more than two decades inside the company - in IT, international, sustainability, government affairs and Chief of Staff - before being named President in 2023 and CEO in April 2026.
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz is a Chilean-born entrepreneur and CEO & Co-Founder of Andes, a California-based climate tech company that deploys beneficial soil microbes via seed coatings to permanently lock atmospheric CO2 into soil minerals. A former investment banker turned biotech founder, he led development of the world's first Microbial Carbon Mineralization (MCM) Methodology — validated under ISO 14064 — and has raised $41M+ to scale a platform that simultaneously improves farm yields and generates durable carbon credits.
Nicolas Pinkowski
Nicolas Pinkowski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nitricity, a Fremont, California-based clean energy company reinventing how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Armed with a Stanford PhD in Energy Systems, Pinkowski and his co-founders turned a backyard experiment on a lemon tree into a $95M-funded company producing organic nitrogen fertilizer from air, water, renewable electricity, and recycled almond shells. Their flagship product, Ash Tea, delivers 92% lower emissions than conventional fertilizers, has achieved OMRI certification, and has already generated over $150M in binding offtake agreements. Pinkowski was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021 and is an Unreasonable Food Fellow (2024), leading Nitricity's expansion from California into global markets.