Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 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 Kingdom based CEO’ operating in the AgTech space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
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 Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Somdip Dey
Founder & CEO of Nosh Technologies
Somdip Dey, also professionally known as InteliDey, is an Embedded Artificial Intelligence scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, AI art & music creator and TED speaker. Dey is the CEO of Nosh Technologies. Born on December 13, 1990, in Kolkata, India, Somdip Dey is the only child of a painter mother, Soma Dey, and a commercial artist father, Sudip Dey. Dey attended South Point High School in Kolkata, India and went to study bachelor’s in Computer Science at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, where he graduated with a first-class degree. Throughout his schooling, Dey had a passion for visual arts and theatre. After graduating with a Computer Science degree Dey pursued a career of an engineer, a scientist and an entrepreneur. In 2012, Dey invented a digital QR authentication system that was adopted by institutes around the world to stop the generation of fake degree certificates. In 2013, he moved to the U.K. to pursue master’s study and while pursuing his MSc at the University of Manchester in 2014, his parents had a car accident that made him the family’s sole breadwinner. Sending money to his family to support them left Somdip with an empty bank account and he was left to collect food waste from dumpsters. This led him to co-found Codeepy, a start-up committed to co-developing the world’s first crowd food-sharing platform. It won the 3Scale API Award at the Koding’s 2014 Global Hackathon & inspired entrepreneurs to develop similar solutions. In 2020, Dey co-founded Nosh Technologies, which developed an AI-powered food management app to reduce food waste in the household, and Dey also assumed the role of CEO of the company. Dey is also a TEDx speaker. In regard to visual arts and theatre, Dey made his first debut in the documentary, “Unity” (2020), talking about his experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dey produces music using AI algorithms and releases them under the stagename InteliDey.
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About Extreme AIM Records, Nosh Technologies, ReMe Basket Ltd., University of Essex: Nosh Technologies operates as a deep tech company that develops applications to optimize food management and food waste at home.
Kenny Ewan
CEO & Founder of Wefarm
Kenny Ewan is originally from Scotland and he studied architecture at Dundee University, before moving to Peru to work for an international NGO for seven years. While he was in Peru he worked closely with local farmers and indigenous communities on sustainable agriculture projects,where he learned about the power of grassroots innovation. After his time in Peru he joined Cafedirect Producers Foundation, an independent UK charity that works with a network of more than 280,000 smallholder farmers. As part of their start-up team he led the development of WeFarm from 2010 to 2014, before launching it as an independent social enterprise in 2015. WeFarm connects smallholder farmers in Africa and Latin America to vital information on agriculture via SMS. Farmers can ask questions on farming and receive crowdsourced answers from farmers around the world on even the most basic mobile phone, without having internet access or leaving their farm. In November 2015 we have 32,000 farmers using our system.
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About Wefarm: Wefarm is a farmer-to-farmer digital network that enables users to share information via SMS.
Jevan Nagarajah
CEO of Better Dairy
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About Better Dairy: Building the future of food, starting with dairy.
Keiran Olivares Whitaker
Founder & CEO of Entocycle
Environmental engineer, YC alumni, five years expertise in rearing insects, passionate environmentalist, deep sea diver.
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About Entocycle: Entocycle’s automated insect farm produces environmentally friendly insect protein to feed farmed animals.
Kizito Okelue
CEO & Founder of KODGAV
Kizito is the Founder of KODGAV. Before structuring KODGAV as limited liability company in October 2019, he worked as a sole proprietor developing business strategies. Beyond being an Entrepreneur he’s a fitness avid and creative.
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About KODGAV, KODGAV UK: Agtech platform creating new data driven food systems by integrating African smallholder farmers into a global supply chain.
Ben Scott-Robinson
Co-Founder and CEO of The Small Robot Company
Ben is the founder of The Small Robot Company. We have a mission to help farmers feed the world while regenerating the planet. We call this the Fourth Agricultural Revolution. Our service of robots, are called Tom Dick and Harry, and the brains of the operation, Wilma. Previously he ran Ordnance Survey’s internal agency creating beautiful products and campaigns with the world’s best maps. Before that, Ben started many startups, and worked as Creative and Experience Director at Top 10 digital agencies such as Digitas and Sapient.
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About The Small Robot Company: The Small Robot Company is delivering per plant farming for the world’s largest crops.
Stephanie Race
CEO of Crop Performance
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About Crop Performance: Crop Performance provides predictive analytics for sustainable agriculture to transition growers to regenerative practices.
Matija Zulj
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AGRIVI
Matija is the founder and CEO of Agrivi. Matija believes that if we provide knowledge and technology to all food producers, we can provide enough food for everyone and keep agriculture sustainable. He holds an MSc in computer science and an MBA. Agrivi is an agri-tech startup that is creating the global agricultural eco-system with vision to change the way food is produced. With an intelligent cloud farm management solution, we help farmers to increase their productivity and find buyers for produced food. Agrivi is the winner of World Startup Competition 2014
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About AGRIVI: AGRIVI is a global agritech company with the market leading farm management software
Graham Ellis
CEO of Ocean Harvest Technology Limited
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About GLG, Ocean Harvest Technology Limited: Ag-Tech company developing prebiotic solutions for animals and humans using macroalgal sources
Rob Ward
CEO & Founder of Forward Food
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About Forward Food, Grocery Accelerator: Forward Food working with AgTech and FoodTech businesses that provide access to commercial support with investment.
Jamie McInnes
Chief Executive Officer of Hectare Agritech
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About Hectare Agritech: Hectare is an agritech company focused on exploiting current inefficiencies and deficiencies in the farming industry supply chains.
Charlie Guy
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of LettUs Grow
Charlie Guy is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at LettUs Grow.
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About LettUs Grow: LettUs Grow design aeroponic irrigation and control technology for vertical farms.
Xiong Chang
CEO of Tensorfield Agriculture
Xiong is passionate about leading teams with a laser-focus on delivering customer value. He studied Manufacturing Engineering at Cambridge University and worked as a design engineer at GE Energy before moving to investment banking where he led global projects as Agile Product Owner among other roles. His mechanical design for one Beetl robot was included in the Top 10 Robotics Start-Ups at CES 2017 by Robotics Business Review.
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About Beetl Robotics, Tensorfield Agriculture: Tensorfield Agriculture is building the next generation of agricultural machines with a focus on applications for specialty row crops.
Anders Gundersen
CEO & Founder of Sensonomic
Anders has experience from C-level strategy consulting, academia and the finance industry. He has been project lead on multiple projects in Scandinavia, UK and East Africa. Realising that land management issues are inherently complex, and that decisions affecting people, nature and businesses are often made with too little information, he founded Sensonomic to provide better data for decision making and risk management. Anders holds an MBA from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Economics from the University of Bergen.
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About Sensonomic: Sensonomic creates computer simulations of agricultural systems to optimise yield, improve operations and increase resilience.
Tashia Tucker
Co-Founder & CEO of Olombria
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About Olombria: Olombria is an agricultural technology that curates fly behaviour, to increase pollination and ensure greater crop yields.
Alex Fisher
Founder & CEO of Saturn Bioponics
Alex has driven the Saturn Grower technology from initial experiments through to market ready product over the last 7 years. He has significant experience in all aspects of the technology and its application in the commercial growing market place. He is working with some of the UK’s leading horticultural crop growers, processors, industry figures and researchers, as well as with commercial partners in international markets. Alex has overall responsibility for the direction of the company but remains involved with all customers at both sales and support levels.
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About Saturn Bioponics: Saturn Bioponics provides crop production systems to improve profitability by increasing yields and reducing labour and resource costs.
Alexander Fisher
CEO of Saturn Bioponics
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About Saturn Bioponics: Saturn Bioponics provides crop production systems to improve profitability by increasing yields and reducing labour and resource costs.
Mark Begbie
CEO of PlantTech Research Institute
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About PlantTech Research Institute: PlantTech Research Institute develops solutions to horticulture challenges through artificial intelligence.
Andrew Diprose
CEO of RootWave
Andrew specialises in finance and strategy. He joins from Alpha Financial Markets Consulting where he worked for 10 years to help it grow from a start-up to the world’s largest dedicated investment management consultancy. Prior to Alpha, Andrew worked at Accenture. During his time as a consultant, he has lived and worked in the UK, France and USA and has also worked extensively across Europe.
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About RootWave, Ubiqutek: RootWave is an electronic company that develops tools that kills weeds using electricity.
Adam Dixon
CEO & Co-Founder of Phytoponics
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About Human Alchemy, Phytoponics: Phytoponics designs and manufactures Deep Water Culture (DWC) hydroponic growing systems for supply to commercial produce growers.
David Flanders
Chief Executive Officer of Agrimetrics
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About Agrimetrics: Agrimetrics is a big data platform for agri-food value chain, from farm through to consumer.
Rui Andres
Chief Executive Officer of Fieldwork Robotics
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About Fieldwork Robotics: Fieldwork Robotics is developing and commercializing soft, selective, and autonomous harvesting robots.
Maryna Kuzmenko
CEO of Petiole
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About Petiole: Petiole is global platform for plant phenotyping with smartphone
Richard Hobson
CEO and Founder of Herdsy
Richard Hobson holds a B.A. in Finance & DBS(IT) from the Michael Smurfit School of Business. He has a diverse skillset as he is both a Software Developer and an Accountant who has worked in these roles for IBM and Aviva. Under Richard’s leadership, Herdsy has grown from a kitchen table business to one that has won international awards and was a finalist in 2018 for Cambridge Agtech Company of the year.
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About Herdsy: Herdsy automates and analyses farm animal data and converts it into valuable profit decisions for farmers.
