Everything is connected and the clock is ticking: AI and big ag data for food security

Sara Menker is the founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence. Gro is AI for agriculture. Gro’s platform automatically harvests vast amounts of disparate global agricultural data, transforms it into knowledge, and generates predictions for volatile markets. Prior to founding Gro, Sara was a Vice President in Morgan Stanley’s commodities group. She began her career in commodities risk management, where she covered all commodity markets, and subsequently moved to trading, where she managed an options trading portfolio. Sara is a Trustee of the Mandela Institute For Development Studies (MINDS) and a Trustee of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Sara was named a Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a fellow of the Aspen Institute. Sara received a B.A. in Economics and African Studies at Mount Holyoke College and the London School of Economics and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.

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Nemo joined Gro after 8+ years in engineering at Google, where he first worked for several years in web search on ranking algorithms. He was then Tech Lead on Google’s Ad Exchange. He led the engineering team responsible for auction algorithms and mathematical optimization. Most recently, he was Tech Lead for Contributor by Google, a product that he invented and led from research to launch. Contributor enables a post-ads business model for the web through market-based micropayments. Previously, Nemo was co-founder of Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. which provided real-time auction-based bandwidth exchanges for content providers and ISPs. Nemo was also co-founder of a VOIP startup, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University.

Nemo is the author of dozens of highly cited research publications, and inventor on 9 US patents, with several more pending. He obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, where his dissertation won the Eliahu I. Jury award. He also holds a Masters in engineering from McGill, where he specialized in control theory applied to biomechanical robots, and a B. Eng (Honours) in Honours Electrical Engineering and Math, where he graduated with distinction and a university scholar award.

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