Boardroom Media (CTO News)
At CTO (Boardroom Media) we track over 1,000,000 startups and over 5,000,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United States based CTO’ operating in the Agriculture space. If you think a CTO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on [email protected]
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Jim Ostrowski
Chief Technology Officer of Blue River Technology
Follow Jim Ostrowski:
About Blue River Technology: Blue River Technology employs computer vision and robotics technologies to build intelligent solutions for the agricultural industries.
Mike Warren
Co-founder & CTO of Descartes Labs
Mike leads the technical team at Descartes Labs as the Co-founder & CTO. His past work spans a wide range of disciplines, with the recurring theme of developing and applying advanced software and computing technology to understand the physical and virtual world. He was a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years, and also worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Sandpiper Networks/Digital Island. His work has been recognized on multiple occasions, including the Gordon Bell prize for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. He has degrees in Physics and Engineering & Applied Science from Caltech, and he received a PhD in Physics from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Follow Mike Warren:
About Descartes Labs: Optimizing sustainable sourcing, commodity price forecasting, & mineral exploration through the automated analysis of geospatial data
Jon Binney
Co-Founder & CTO of Iron Ox
Jon Binney is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Iron Ox.
Follow Jon Binney:
About Iron Ox: Iron Ox operates autonomous robotic greenhouses that grow every plant at its best from seed to harvest.
Rob Wetzeler
Chief Technology Officer of John Deere
Rob Wetzeler is the Chief Technology Officer of John Deere. He has a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems at the University of Northern Iowa.
Follow Rob Wetzeler:
About John Deere: John Deere manufactures agricultural, construction, and forestry machinery.
Craig Rupp
Founder/CEO/CTO/Farmer of Sabanto
Follow Craig Rupp:
About Sabanto: Farming-as-a-Service using low-cost autonomous machines
Lee Chae
Co-Founder and CTO of Brightseed
Lee Chae is the Co-founder and CTO at Brightseed.
Follow Lee Chae:
About Brightseed: Brightseed features artificial intelligence that reveals powerful compounds hidden in nature.
Ziggy Jonsson
CTO of Ferry Farm Capital Management
Co-founder+CTO @ TheNumber – Senior Partner @ One Zero Capital
Follow Ziggy Jonsson:
About 1/0 Capital, Ferry Farm Capital Management: Ferry Farm is an Investment Firm.
Thomas Palomares
Co-Founder and CTO of FarmWise
Follow Thomas Palomares:
About FarmWise: Feeding our World, and our Future.
Jim Mills
CTO of Nature’s Fynd
Jim Millis serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Nature’s Fynd.
Follow Jim Mills:
About Nature’s Fynd: Nature’s Fynd is a food company that makes nutritional vegan protein from a microbe.
Uzoma Ayogu
Co-founder & CTO of Releaf
Follow Uzoma Ayogu:
About Releaf: Releaf is an agriculture company that develops novel industrial processing technology in Africa’s sustainable oil palm sector.
Peter Meinhold
Co-Founder & CTO of Provivi
Mr. Peter Meinhold, Ph.D., serves as Chief Technology Officer of Provivi, Inc. Mr. Meinhold was a co-founder and Director of Research at Gevo, Inc. since 2005 until May 2013. He has 12 years of experience in research and development of biotechnology for fuels and chemicals production. For his thesis research, Mr. Meinhold engineered the fatty acid hydroxylating cytochrome P450 BM-3 into an alkane hydroxylating one that accepts substrates as short as ethane. In 2010, he was recognized by MIT’s Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators. He holds nine issued patents in the U.S. alone with dozens more pending. Mr. Meinhold received his Diploma (equivalent to a B.Sc.) in Biotechnology from the University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan, Germany and a PhD in Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
Follow Peter Meinhold:
About Provivi: Provivi develops biopesticides for agriculture, commercial, household, and public health pest management.
Keith Narr
Chief Technology Officer & Vice President of Cargill
Keith is responsible for leading Enterprise Architecture, the Cloud team, the Enterprise Data Platform team, the Immersive Learning Center (ILC) and the Apollo team. He is also filling an interim role as the Data and Business Intelligence (D&BI) Lead. Prior to joining Cargill in May of 2016, Keith spent 20 years at the North American retailer Target. During that 20 year tenure Keith held positions as a Software Developer, Database Administrator, Server Administrator, Information Security Consultant, Directory Services Manager, Lead Data Architect and Principal Architect for Data and Cloud.
Follow Keith Narr:
About Cargill: Cargill is an international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products and services.
Austin Lawrence
Co-founder & CTO of Fifth Season
Follow Austin Lawrence:
About Fifth Season: Fifth Season is a consumer tech company transforming modern indoor agriculture with automated robotics and software analytics.
Isar Mostafanezhad
CTO of Smart Yields
Follow Isar Mostafanezhad:
About Nalu Scientific, Smart Yields: Founded in 2015, Smart Yields connects farmers, researchers and their communities through real-time analytics from connected sensors.
Tania Timmermann
CTO of Andes
Tania Timmermann Aranis is the Chief Technology Officer of Andes.
Follow Tania Timmermann:
About Andes: Andes empowers biology to enable positive action against climate change.
Farooq Anjum
Co-Founder and CTO of GroGuru
CTO/Co-Founder at GroGuru Inc.
Follow Farooq Anjum:
About GroGuru: GroGuru is an agriculture company that help farmers increase their crop yield using water in a sustainable way.
Yan Ke
Founder and CTO of Clobotics
Follow Yan Ke:
About Clobotics: Clobotics provides intelligent computer vision solutions for the retail and wind power sectors.
Justin Sanchez
CTO and Co-Founder of Terra Vera
Justin Cofounded Terra Vera corporation in April of 2020, bringing over 14 years of experience in novel on-demand chemistry applications at MIOX and DeNora. A serial entrepreneur with a multidisciplinary skill set in Operations and Engineering, Justin is committed to Terra Vera’s goal of replacing harmful pesticides with safer, greener, and cleaner alternatives. Justin has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a BS and MS in Materials Science and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management. He attended MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations Program
Follow Justin Sanchez:
About MIOX, Terra Vera: A safe, platform technology provider that enables clients to control their anti-microbial supply chain
Stan Guzik
Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of S&P Global Platts
Stan Guzik is a global technology executive at S&P Global. He is seasoned at establishing transformational technology strategy and vision to software development, infrastructure, DevOps and leading global teams of more than nine hundred while maintaining hands-on software engineering skills. He pairs executive management with deep software engineering skills to quickly cut through project noise and rapidly produce results where others have struggled. He has extensive experience building SaaS-based businesses that experience healthy growth and is known for results, strong execution, and leading change.
Follow Stan Guzik:
About S&P Global Platts: S&P Global Platts is a global provider of energy, petrochemicals and metals information.
Graham Smith
CTO and Co-founder of Babylon
Graham Smith is the CTO and Co-founder at Babylon.
Follow Graham Smith:
About Babylon: On-site vertical farming solutions for foodservice, hospitality, and retail
Xitang Zhao
CTO and Co-Founder of FoodFul
Follow Xitang Zhao:
About AccessPass, FoodFul: FoodFul is an agritech company providing cloud-based management systems to dairy farmers.
Koos du Preez
Co-Founder and CTO of TerraClear
Koos du Preez is the chief technology officer of [K2](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/k2#/entity), a solution that enables users to build and run business applications, including forms, workflow, data, and reports.
Follow Koos du Preez:
About TerraClear: TerraClear is an agricultural technology company focused on improving farmers’ productivity through end to end automation.
Travis Bayer
Co-Founder, CTO of Sound Agriculture
Travis Bayer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Sound Agriculture.
Follow Travis Bayer:
About Sound Agriculture: Sound Agriculture uses molecular discovery to create climate resilient crops, enhancing harvest yields for growers.
David Williamson
Chief Technology Officer of Modern Meadow
Follow David Williamson:
About Modern Meadow: Modern Meadow provides biofabricated leather materials intended to offer animal-free leather made from living cells.
Umer Ilyas
Co-Founder and CTO of Cowlar
Umer Ilyas is CTO at Cowlar.
Follow Umer Ilyas:
About Cowlar: Cowlar is a Fitbit for Dairy cows.
Keith McCall
Founder & CTO of Pollen Systems
Keith McCall is a serial entrepreneur who spent 15 years building products for Lotus, IBM, and Microsoft. Agriculture was the obvious next venture due to his passion to apply information and data analysis technologies to underserved industries. Previously, Keith founded Azaleos, acquired by Avanade in 2012, and founded Enroute Systems, acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2016.
Follow Keith McCall:
About Pollen Systems: Pollen Systems is a developer of an agriculture analysis system designed to improve crop yields.
Danen Pool
Co-Founder & CTO of Nebullam
Danen Pool is the Co-Founder & CTO at Nebullam, Inc.
Follow Danen Pool:
About Nebullam: Nebullam helps home and commercial growers on better food production through Aeroponics paired with time-saving software.
Morris Gasmer
Co-Founder and CTO of Local Urban Vegetables
Morris Gasmer currently works as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Local Urban Vegetables.
Follow Morris Gasmer:
About Local Urban Vegetables: Local Urban Vegetables is an AgTech startup that provides vertical farming technology.
Michael Thompson
Co-founder, CTO of CropZilla
For over 45 years Mike has been solving problems. This includes the development of software models for paper mills, a number for investments, the alternative fuel industry and for the past 20 years commercial models for agriculture. Mike holds several trademarks and patents He is a published children’s book author. A roofing product he designed from recycled plastic won the building division of the California Clean Tech Open. He has an engineering degree from Miami University.
Follow Michael Thompson:
About CropZilla: CropZilla is software for farm resource planning and operations. Our farmers are able to design and plan their planting.
Parthsarathi Trivedi
Founder & CTO of Aerial Intelligence
Parthsarathi Trivedi is the CEO & Co-Founder at Skylo
Follow Parthsarathi Trivedi:
About Aerial Intelligence, Skylo: It provides insights and analytics for the agricultural commodities supply chain.
Ameer Shakeel
Chief Technology Officer of AgroSpheres
Ameer is a biomedical engineering graduate. Ameer spearheads the research and technical development of our products. He is passionate about conducting meaningful research that translates to real world applications.
Follow Ameer Shakeel:
About AgroSpheres, AgroSpheres: AgroSpheres develops novel technologies that aim to set a new standard for bio-based delivery of active ingredients.
Jeff McNeill
Co-Founder, Former CTO & Principal Engineer of Smartfield
Follow Jeff McNeill:
About Ascent Engineering, Smartfield: Smartfield develops and supplies irrigation management solutions to the agriculture industry.
Mutlu Ozdogan
Founder & CTO of Agrograph
Mutlu Ozdogan is the Founder and CTO at Agrograph Inc.
Follow Mutlu Ozdogan:
About Agrograph, University of Wisconsin – Madison: Agrograph is a global agrifinance company offering field-scale predictive models for earning potential of agricultural assets.
Bob Farinelli
President & CTO of Smart Farm Systems
Smart Farm’s President and CTO, Bob Farinelli, was previously the founder and CTO of Elan Home Systems, a leading smart home automation company. Bob and his team grew Elan from $0 to $24M in sales before selling the business to Nortek in 2002. Bob continued to lead and grow the Elan division for Nortek through 2011. In 2012, Bob was challenged by Ryan Heringer, an Elan dealer, to build a similar platform for agriculture, after a farmer-customer of Ryan’s requested such a network. In 2013, Bob and one of his top engineers from Elan, Steve Christensen, began building the Smart Farm monitoring and control system.
Follow Bob Farinelli:
About Smart Farm Systems: Smart Farm provides farmers valuable, real-time, actionable information regarding the status of equipment and crops.
Kyle Johnson
Chief Technology Officer of Ganaz
Follow Kyle Johnson:
About Ganaz: Ganaz is the leading people platform for agriculture and food manufacturing in North America
Tim Mueller-Sim
CTO of Bloomfield Robotics
Follow Tim Mueller-Sim:
About Bloomfield Robotics: Bloomfield Robotics assesses the health and performance of plants — one plant at a time — using deep learning and portable cameras.
Erick Kobres
CTO and Co-Founder of AgVoice
Follow Erick Kobres:
About AgVoice, Keychainworks, TekWear: AgVoice is a hands-free enabled, voice-interactive mobile technology for food and agriculture professionals to capture insights on the go.
Neal Checka
Chief Technology Officer of Allyke, Inc.
Neal is a highly accomplished technologist with experience in heading R&D programs related to the Department of Defense, NASA, and NIH. Educated at MIT, he has multiple leading-edge disciplines including computer vision, robotics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and software development.
Follow Neal Checka:
About Allyke, Inc.: Allyke is a retail shopping platform specializing in AI utilizing omnichannel technology.
Rich Fletcher
CTO and Co-Founder of New West Genetics
Follow Rich Fletcher:
About Cargill, New West Genetics: New West Genetics combines traditional breeding, modern genomics, and agronomic expertise to create premium, proprietary hemp seed genetics.
Joseph Brabec
CTO of Topcon Positioning Systems
Joseph Brabec is a CTO at Topcon Positioning Systems.
Follow Joseph Brabec:
About Topcon Positioning Systems: Topcon Positioning Systems, Inc. designs and manufactures precision positioning equipment and solutions for the global surveying.
Nimrod Ben-Yehuda
CTO, CEO of Pimi Agro
Mr. Nimrod Ben-Yehuda is our Chief Technology Officer responsible for developing the Company’s technology, and also serves as a member of our Board of Directors. During the past 18 years, Mr. Ben-Yehuda has been a leading entrepreneur in the field of environment friendly solutions using STHP in many applications. He is the Co-Founder of Pimi and was the inventor of its IP and products. From 1986-1989 served as Joint CEO of NitroJet LTD, from 1989 until 2003 served as CEO of Nir Ecology which develops ecological solutions for veterinary, food industries and hospitals and from 1993 until 2003 serves as joint CEO and CTO of Swissteril Water Purifications Ltd which developed a protocol for purification of water. Since 2003 until today he serves as CTO of Pimi Israel.
Follow Nimrod Ben-Yehuda:
About Pimi Agro: Pimi Agro was established in 2004 to capitalize on many years of research in developing eco-friendly solutions.
Nikola Milivojevic
Chief Technology Officer of SunTech Drive
Nikola Milivojevic is an energetic entrepreneur with strong technical background, and experience with managing research and development teams in the renewable energy sector. He is the CTO of SunTech Drive, setting the technology development and strategy. Previously, he was Vice President at Bright Energy, the company that acts as a think-tank in the energy storage space. Nikola led a research team that developed compressed air energy storage system, as a part of the NAVY project in 2013/14. For the purpose of that project, Nikola put together the team of 20 engineers and successfully developed 100kW, 400kWh compressed air thermal energy storage system, which was tested by NAVY specification. Prior to that he was the Director of Engineering at Southwest Windpower, a company that was a leader in small wind industry, with more than quarter a million wind turbines sold. Nikola led a team of dozen engineers, developing scalable turbine controllers, and doing value engineering to existing units of a product line. He personally was involved in certification testing with UL and GL, where Skystream 3.7 was the first turbine to be certified in a small wind turbine industry. The technology Nikola developed was acquired by Xzeres Wind and Primus Wind, companies that are still selling those wind turbines worldwide. Nikola was also a founder of MagDrive, a start-up company that was developing electronic controllers for wind and solar industry. In 2011 Nikola was a Principal Investigator on the project granted by WE Energies, a Wisconsin utility. He earned his PhD at Illinois Institute of Technology, and his MsC and BS from Electrical Engineering school from University of Belgrade. He published several journal papers and few dozen conference papers on renewable energy, and also holds few patents.
Follow Nikola Milivojevic:
About SunTech Drive: SunTech Drive delivers the most efficient off-grid nanogrid controllers on the market.
Nate Dudenhoeffer
Chief Technology Officer of BoviSync
Nate Dudenhoeffer is the co-founder and lead engineer of BoviSync.
Follow Nate Dudenhoeffer:
About BoviSync: BoviSync offers a mobile application with advanced reporting on a computer to manage the dairy farm of the user with ease.
Mark J. Mueller
Chief Technology Officer of Botanic Innovations
Mark Mueller, a life-long student of botany, is the founder of the Company and serves in his current capacity as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Board Member. With a Master’s of Science Degree in Water Resource Management from the University of Wisconsin, Mark gained extensive experience in rural business innovation and technology programs, working for the University of Minnesota-Duluth Center for Economic Development, the Northwest Regional Planning Commission (NWRPC) and the Wisconsin Business Innovation Corporation (WBIC). As executive director of NWRPC and most recently as a consultant to that organization, he has been involved in strategic direction, development of a regional network of business enterprise centers and the formulation of equity financing fund. Mueller used his entrepreneurial spirit to found Botanic Innovations, LLC. He transitioned the company to developing plant-oils and nutri-powders with a focus on nutritional, personal care, and specialty markets.
Follow Mark J. Mueller:
About Botanic Innovations: Botanic Innovations produces oils, nutri powders and other derivatives from non-GMO fruits, vegetables, grains and herb seeds.
Greg Bryan
Chief Technology Officer of ZeaKal
Greg Bryan is one of the scientific co-founders of ZeaKal and developed the international public-private collaboration model alongside Kapyon Ventures. He guided the early research program that ultimately resulted in the PhotoSeed™ and SunZoil™ technologies. As CTO, Greg Bryan continues to manage the product development for the company. Previously Greg Bryan was a Principal Scientist at AgResearch’s (a New Zealand Crown Research Organization) forage improvement group. Over a fifteen-year period, he built the plant biotechnology capabilities of the organization from the ground up. He also brings significant industry experience in the commercialization of biotech products having spent five years at DuPont (Wilmington, Delaware) where he was a postdoctoral scientist and then principal investigator developing disease resistance technologies for rice and wheat programs. Greg Bryan was joint winner of the inaugural 2013 AgResearch Science Prize for work uncovering a completely novel and dogma breaking mechanism of growth of a symbiotic fungus of pasture grass. He has BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Auckland and a Ph.D. in fungal biotechnology from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (Sainsbury Laboratory, John Innes Centre).
Follow Greg Bryan:
About AgResearch, ZeaKal: Plant traits innovator helping crops capture more carbon and sunlight, leading to healthier, nutrient-rich food and feed.
David Kelly
Chief Technology Officer of Praedictus Climate Solutions
David’s area of expertise are systems programming and high performance computing. While working towards a degree in computer science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded a stipend by Google Summer of Code to make several improvements to the Swift parallel scripting language. Following successful completion of his project, he went on to work full time with the Swift development team at the University of Chicago’s Computation Institute. David’s recent work has been related to running large-scale crop model simulations in parallel on a variety of grids, clouds, clusters, and supercomputers.
Follow David Kelly:
About Praedictus Climate Solutions: Developed software tools to provide real-time crop projections.
Peter Brandt
CTO of Agrian
Follow Peter Brandt:
About Agrian: Agrian is a single source, easy-to-use solution for ag retailers, crop advisors, agronomists, growers, food handlers and food processors.
Jim Sibert
CTO, Co-Founder of Rain Systems
Follow Jim Sibert:
About Rain Systems: Rain Systems patented technology, the Precision Injection Machine, installs hydrogel into existing turf and reduces irrigation by 50%.
Owen Jerez
CEO, CTO of Water Source Tech
Follow Owen Jerez:
About Water Source Tech: WaterSource Technologies recognizes these critical issues and changes the way you manage your water bill.
Kevin Kung
CTO and Co-Founder of Takachar
Kevin Kung is the Co-Founder and CTO at Takachar.
Follow Kevin Kung:
About Takachar: Takachar creates a network of waste management enterprises in Kenya that turn unmanaged agricultural residues into charcoal.
Richard Van Deusen
CTO of Rapid Diagnostek
Follow Richard Van Deusen:
About Rapid Diagnostek: Rapid Diagnostek develops biosensor-based diagnostic tests for the detection of proteins, bacteria and viruses contained in liquid samples.
Scott Steinbeck
CTO of Agri Tracking Systems
Scott Steinbeck is the Chief Technology Officer at Agri Tracking Systems.
Follow Scott Steinbeck:
About Agri Tracking Systems: Agri Tracking Systems offers farm management tools that keep track of farms, fields, crops, nutrient samples, budgets, and daily operations.
