Category: UNCATEGORIZED

If you work for someone else, you know the drill: in comes that annual email reminding you that it’s time for unconscious bias or sexual harassment training, and if you could please finish up this mandatory module by this date, that would be terrific.

The email — not to mention the programming itself — is straight out of “Office Space.” Little surprise that when Anne Solmssen, a Harvard-trained computer scientist, happened to call a friend recently who was clicking through his own company-sponsored training program, his answer to how it was going was, “It’s more interesting when I have baseball on.”

Solmssen has some other ideas about how to make sexual harassment training far more interesting and less “cringe-worthy.” Indeed, she recently joined forces with Roxanne Petraeus, another Harvard grad, to create Ethena, a software-as-a-service startup that’s promising customizable training delivered in bite-size segments that caters to individuals based on how much they already know about sexual harassment in the workplace. The software will also be sector specific when it’s released more widely in the first quarter of next year.

The company first came together this past summer, led by Petraeus, who joined the U.S. Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to help defray the cost of her Ivy league education and wound up spending seven years in the U.S. Army, including as a civil affairs officer, before cofounding an online meals marketplace, then spending a year with McKinsey & Co. to get a better handle on how businesses are run.

Petraeus says that across her experience, and particularly in the Army, she had “great leaders who were super thoughtful” about sexual harassment training, “who cared about their [reports’] development goals and what was happening in their personal lives, and brought out the best in their people, rather than making them feel less than or marginalized.”

Still, she was aware that from an institutional standpoint, most harassment training is not thoughtful, that it’s a matter of checking boxes on an annual basis to ensure compliance with different state laws, depending on where an organization is headquartered. She marveled that so much of the content employees are being forced to consume seems “designed for a 1980s law firm.”

Solmssen was meanwhile working for a venture-backed public safety software company, Mark43. She was getting along just fine, too, but when a friend put the two in touch on the hunch that their engineering talent and vision could amount to something, that instinct proved right.

“I’d been working for Mark43 for four years, and I wasn’t particularly interested in starting a business,” Solmssen says. “But I fell in love with Roxanne and this idea, and I came to this thinking that someone needs to make [this training process] better. We’re still using the tools and technologies that we’ve had since 1997.”

So how is what they’re building different than what’s currently available? In lots of ways, seemingly. For starters, Ethena doesn’t want to employees to “knock it out all at once” in an hour or two of training at the end of each year. Instead, it’s creating what it calls monthly “nudges” that deliver relevant studies and questions on a monthly basis — information that can then be used in an all-hands meeting, for example, helping to reinforce its goals.

It’s also focused on sending content and questions to people that’s iterative and that evolves based on how an individual responds. A new hire might answer very differently than a sponsor of other women within an organization, for example. It’s a stark contrast to to the black-and-white scenarios that every employee is typically presented. (Think: “Judy and Brian go to a bar after work.”)

These subtleties are a significant development, argues Petraeus, because “traditional training implicitly tells employees that going to spending time together outside of work is bad for mentorship. It’s why you hear things like, ‘I just hired my first female analyst; can I get into an Uber with her when we’re traveling?'” Turning every mixed-gender occasion into a potential minefield is “not the message we should be conveying.”

Yet it’s a message that’s being absorbed.  According to a survey conducted earlier this year by LeanIn.Org and SurveyMonkey, 60% of managers who are men are now uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together. That’s a 32% jump from a year ago.  According to that same survey, senior-level men are now 12 times more hesitant to have one-on-one meetings with junior women, 9 times more hesitant to travel together and 6 times more hesitant to have work dinners together.

Even the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thinks sexual harassment training has gone wrong somewhere, noting that it hasn’t worked as a prevention tool in part because it’s been too focused on simply avoiding legal liability. Indeed, a few years ago, a task force studying harassment in the workplace on behalf of the EEOC concluded that “effective training cannot occur in a vacuum – it must be part of a holistic culture of non-harassment that starts at the top.” Similarly, it added, “one size does not fit all: training is most effective when tailored to the specific workforce and workplace and different cohorts of employees.”

Toward that end, and with compliance in mind, Ethena is also modernizing the content it delivers, including as it pertains to dating at work, which definitely happens; and inclusivity around pregnant colleagues, who are often subtly marginalized; and transgender colleagues, who can also find themselves feeling either misunderstood or overlooked by current sexual harassment training materials.

There’s also a heavy focus on analytics. If 60 percent of employees don’t know about a company’s policies around office dating, for example, or employees in an outfit’s marketing department appear to know less about an organization’s values than other departments, it will flag these things so managers can take preventative action. (“Say there’s a new manager in the L.A. office where employees seem to be answering less consistently,” suggests Solmssen. “We can provide additional training to get that person up to speed.”)

For Petraeus — who is the daughter-in-law of retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus — the overarching goal is to kill off mandatory yearly training where the takeaway for many employees, the fundamental standard, is, “Can I go to jail for this comment?”

It’s too soon to say if Ethena will be successful. It’s only halfway through a pilot training program at the moment. But Solmssen and Petraeus are strong pitchmen, and they say their software will be available beginning in the first quarter of next year for $4 per employee per month, which is on a par with other e-learning programs.

The startup has also won the support of early backers who’ve already given the months-old outfit $850,000 to start hiring. Among those investors: Neo (a venture fund started last year by serial entrepreneur Ali Partovi), Village Global, and Jane VC, which is a fund focused on women-led startups.

Numerous angel investors have also written Ethena a check, including Reshma Saujani, who is the founder of the organization Girls Who Code, and a handful of military veterans.

As for the last, “they’re not a group that’s typically represented in startup ventures,” observes Petraeus, “but in terms of leadership and thinking about how to get a diverse team oriented around the same goal,” they’re hard to match, she adds.

Imagine a hypersonic passenger aircraft that would cut the journey time between London and New York to around two hours. At Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, the aircraft would complete a trip across the Atlantic in around 120 minutes. Mach 5 is more than twice as fast as the cruising speed of Concorde and over 50% faster than the SR-71 Blackbird – the world’s fastest jet-engine powered aircraft. A flight across the Pacific would take roughly three hours. Flight times from London to Sydney could be 80% shorter. Who needs Elon Musk?

Reaching these speeds would require an aircraft engine that has never previously existed. But last week, the world got a glimpse of a new future via a project which has been germinating for 30 years.

Reaction Engines was founded in 1989 by three propulsion engineers from Rolls Royce: Alan Bond, Richard Varvill and John Scott Scott. Their idea was that in order for an engine to reach hypersonic speeds, the air going into it would have to be rapidly cooled, otherwise the engine would melt. Reaction’s breakthrough was inventing a “precooler” or heat exchanger which can take the air down to minus 150 degrees centigrade in less than a 20th of a second.

These ultra-lightweight “heat exchangers” would enable aircraft to fly over five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere. Thus the SABRE – Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine – was born. The Sabre engine “breathes” air to make 20 per cent of the journey to orbit, before switching to rocket mode to complete the trip.

Last week, Reaction Engines passed a significant milestone. It successfully tested its innovative precooler at airflow temperature conditions representing Mach 5.

The ground-based test at the Colorado Air and Space Port in the US, saw the precooler successfully operate at temperatures of 420ᵒC (~788ᵒF) – matching the thermal conditions corresponding to Mach 3.3 flight.

But this technology wouldn’t just be applicable to hypersonic flight. The precooler technology, developed by Reaction Engines, would significantly enhance the performance of existing jet engine technology, along with applications in automotive, aerospace, energy and industrial processes. Reaction Engines has attracted development funding from the British government, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Space Agency. It’s also raised over £100m from public and private sources and has secured investment from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Boeing’s venture capital arm HorizonX. Reaction is expected to start building and testing a demonstrator engine next year.

The success of Reaction Engines to date is a sign that the ‘AerospaceTech’ sector is now booming. It is most certainly not alone.

Last month, Boeing and the UK government launched a £2m accelerator program to look for new innovations in this area. Boeing’s HorizonX is backing the initiative.

The husband and wife co-founders behind the direct-to-consumer cookware and dinnerware startup retailer OurPlace are big believers in the notion that the doorway to inclusive communities opens through the kitchen. 

Amir Tehrani, the company’s co-founder and chief executive spent, his life in the cookware and kitchen business, while his wife, Shiza Tehrani, is the co-founder of the Malala Fund, supporting educational initiatives for young women around the world, and Now Ventures, an impact seed investment fund based in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles-based company is taking Shiza’s belief in social missions and the power of entrepreneurialism to transform communities, and Amir’s knowledge of the multibillion-dollar cookware and dinnerware business, to create a consumer-focused business that celebrates the culture surrounding cooking and uses it as a way to educate and inform — all while selling high-end pots, pans, plates and glasses to an audience of socially conscious consumers.

The project has received its initial capital from some pretty high-end backers. So far, the company has raised $2.35 million in financing from investors, including the venture arm of Los Angeles’ startup retail giant, FabFitFun and Will Smith’s Dreamers VC.

Two of the new products available from startup direct to consumer cookware and dinnerware brand OurPlace

The company’s initial line of dinnerware and cookware is manufactured in China and its glassware is manufactured in Thailand.

But the two executives have plans to source its future collections from artisans living in emerging markets around the world. “Our next collection is sourced from Oaxaca,” says Tehrani. “The Oaxaca line… it’s artisans making things out of their home. They’re making everything by hand and there’s no sophisticated machinery to speak of.”

The challenge, says Amir Tehrani, is to help these artisans begin producing products at scale, while staying true to the artisanal nature of the products.

Ultimately, the idea is to educate and inform consumers about the cultural context behind the products they buy, according to the company’s two founders.

There’s also a financial incentive to launch a direct-to-consumer brand, the founders say. It’s an industry that has yet to be disrupted by the technological innovations that have reshaped so many other retail markets, they say… and one that’s equally as large as the mattress industry.

By 2021, the cookware and dinnerware market is projected to be $12.7 billion, according to a study by Freedonia Focus Reports. By comparison, mattresses are about a $14 billion market in the U.S.

And it’s a market that Amir Tehrani knows well. His grandfather founded TableTops Unlimited, one of the largest white-label suppliers of kitchenware, cookware and dinnerware in the U.S. That experience is what brought investors like FabFitFun to the table.

“They understand our capabilities around the family business and they want to help bring it to their community as well,” says Amir Tehrani. “Aside from what they were already doing around fashion and cosmetics the largest opportunity they weren’t already doing was around cookware.”

Google has been working on autonomous vehicles — one of the biggest challenges in AI — for more than a decade, but it’s learning that the hardest part might just be getting people to enjoy the ride.

“This is an experience that you can’t really learn from someone else,” Waymo’s Director of Product Saswat Panigrahi told TechCrunch, while explaining the work he oversees on user experience (UX) development. “This is truly new.”

The sheer novelty of designing a UX for driverless mobility has drawn Waymo away from hard science-based technologies where tech giants often feel most comfortable. In the place of data, sensor and neural net development, Waymo finds its driverless development gated by painstaking research into human factors and behavioral psychology. Despite making critical decisions to avoid delving into the mysteries of human behavior and interactions, Waymo is finding that such research is an unavoidable challenge on the road to driverless mobility.

“User research has always been a big part of the development process,” said Ryan Powell, the company’s head of UX Research and Design.

In 2012, when the Google Self-Driving Car program was “dogfooding” a highway-only driver assistance system called “AutoPilot,” its in-car cameras found that employees were over-relying on the limited automation in dangerous ways. As a result of videos showing Googlers putting on makeup, using multiple devices and even falling asleep while using the system that they’d been told required constant observation, the decision was made to cancel AutoPilot product plans and focus on fully autonomous driving. “That was a big moment for the user research team because we had a big impact on the work that we were doing at Waymo in terms of making that commitment to Level 4 autonomy,” Powell recalls.

After inking what sources said was a nine-figure deal with the the world’s leading supplier of collagen proteins, Gelita, the cell-based collagen maker Geltor is in the market for at least $50 million in new funding, TechCrunch has learned.

According to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, the new funding could range from $50 million to as much as $100 million.

The money would be used to scale up the company’s collagen manufacturing capacity as it preps for the longterm Gelita contract.

Geltor is one of a slew of companies developing technologies to culture proteins at scale as a way to supplement and ultimately replace animal-based proteins in manufacturing.

While other companies pursue meat replacements using cultured products, Geltor is focused on another aspect of the supply chain. The collagen and gelatin additives that are typically made from the waste materials left over from the meat industry.

Traditionally, gelatin is made by boiling skin, cartilage, and bones from animals. The material finds its way into any number of cosmetics and foodstuffs thanks to its ability to act as a thickening agent.

The markets for collagen and gelatin are worth a combined $9 billion dollars, which is a pretty sizable market for Geltor to tackle.

Just as importantly, should the meat replacement industry take off, then replacements will need to be found for the secondary markets that had been supplied by the waste streams for traditional meat processing.

Geltor already sells an animal-free collagen under the “Collume” brand as a marine collagen and “HumaColl21”, which is a human collagen. Both products are used in the skincare market.

The agreement with Gelita marks the company’s first move into food and beverage additives.

“Gelita’s decision to invest in biodesign technologies is a prime example of our commitment to innovation and satisfying market needs,” said Hans-Ulrich Frech, Gelita’s Global Vice President of Business Unit Collagen Peptides in a statement last month. “This addition to GELITA’s collagen portfolio will complement the already robust portfolio of scientifically substantiated Bioactive Collagen Peptides^®, which are key ingredients in foods and nutritional supplements for their protein content and physiological benefits.”

Meanwhile, for Geltor, the deal further proves out the company’s thesis that protein manufacturing can be a big business outside of the meat market that attracted players like Memphis Meats, Future Meat Technologies, and other companies developing cell culture replacements for traditional animal husbandry.

“This pact further solidifies our view that we have entered a new era in how proteins are being utilized to improve products that consumers around the world use every day,” said Alexander Lorestani, the chief executive of Geltor in a statement. “Today, the market is ready and eager for premium offerings of protein ingredients, and this is the need that Geltor is serving.”

In January 2014, Google announced plans to acquire Nest for $3.2 billion; the acquisition was completed the following day, but since then, Nest’s integration has been a controlled burn. Initially, the company existed as a subsidiary of the newly-formed Alphabet Inc., but in early 2018, Google tightened its grip and integrated it directly into its hardware division.

Over the next year and a half, Nest became the face and name of Google’s smart home offering, a division that’s grown quickly as Google Home/Google Nest has become one of the top two players in the U.S. smart home category, rivaled only by Amazon’s Alexa/Echo offerings.

All the while, wearables have been an also-ran: Google has clearly had an interest in the category, launching Android Wear in 2014. The company partnered with some of consumer hardware’s biggest names, including Motorola, Asus, Sony, Huawei and LG, but to little fanfare. A year ahead the release of Android Wear (now Wear OS), Apple brought its own smartwatch to market, effectively leaving the competition in the dust.

The Apple Watch would soon eclipse the rest of the wearable industry; numbers from Canalys in August 2019 show Apple at 37.9 percent of the total North American wearable band market. Fossil, the only Wear OS partner to crack the top five, is in a distant fifth, with 4.1%.

Samsung and Garmin have found success with their own offerings, but both are far behind Fitbit at second place. Founded in 2007, Fitbit would eventually become synonymous with fitness trackers. A humble startup when it showcased its first product (an eponymous 3D pedometer) on stage at our TC50 event in 2008, Fitbit’s rise has been an unqualified success.

Fitbit predicted and eventually came to define the wearable zeitgeist, finding itself at the forefront of the next big wave in consumer electronics after the smartphone. As the mobile category has plateaued, wearables continue to grow at an impressive pace. Let’s take a moment to appreciate what has been an impressive run.

The last few years, however, have been far rockier as Fitbit stumbled and sputtered. By CEO James Park’s own admission, the company failed to embrace smartwatches quickly and fully enough, and as it has so many times in the past, Apple entered and dominated the space, leaving Fitbit reeling with an uncertain future.

Google has reached into parent company Alphabet’s $121 billion cash reserves to spend $2.1 billion on Fitbit, a move into the key consumer health market that places them in more direct competition with rival Apple.

For more than a year, Ftibit and Google have partnered on healthcare applications; last April, Fitbit announced that it would work with Google’s application programming interface to connect data with electronic medical records via Google’s Cloud Healthcare API. That move followed Fitbit’s February 2018 acquisition of Twine Health, which gave the wearables company a consumer health platform which complied with existing federal regulations.

“Working with Google gives us an opportunity to transform how we scale our business, allowing us to reach more people around the world faster, while also enhancing the experience we offer to our users and the healthcare system,” said Fitbit CEO and co-founder James Park at the time of the 2018 Google partnership.

Companies throughout the healthcare industry are pushing to get closer to patients, and wearables have opened a new window into their health. Additionally, the technology can potentially encourage patients to pursue preventive healthcare measures, rather than seeking care after they’re ill.

“All of us… we’re pursuing the same thing,” said a prominent healthcare executive at a multinational medical device manufacturer. “We see a healthcare system that’s highly inefficient with a lot of waste that is very much episode-related, where we all know health is dynamic and continuous.” Gaining “better insight into health and disease drivers and interventions at the right place and the right time is the holy grail.”

Privacy concerns abound

The biggest challenge for Alphabet and Google with this acquisition is privacy; the company has already faced massive criticism for its push into healthcare in the U.K. regarding concerns about how it would handle sensitive health information. The technology industry’s habit of releasing minimum viable products doesn’t work in an industry where complications can literally become a matter of life and death.

Sensing inevitable concern around Google’s upcoming access to a bevy of health data, Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP for devices and services, offered that the company will not use user information for advertising. “We will never sell personal information to anyone,” he wrote. “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads. And we will give Fitbit users the choice to review, move, or delete their data.”

Competition with Apple

Those privacy concerns stand in direct contrast to the obvious competitor driving this acquisition forward — Apple. The Cupertino-based king of consumer hardware has set itself apart from other consumer tech companies through its professed emphasis on privacy, a position that Apple will likely leverage further as it continues to make deeper forays into health.

The mobile version of Nintendo’s iconic racing franchise, Mario Kart Tour, will soon support multiplayer races, bringing the game closer to its competitive roots. A limited multiplayer beta test is planned for December, just in time for holiday laziness, but only for paying subscribers — the rest of us will have to wait.

Mario Kart has had a focus on multiplayer since its first (and best, in my opinion) appearance on the SNES, with multiple modes available pitting players together in real time. So despite Mario Kart Tour’s general excellence as far as gameplay and variety, players have been disappointed by the lack of that core aspect of the game.

Sure, you can post high scores and best times, but that’s nothing compared with the feeling of coming from behind in a hard-fought race and beating out half a dozen tough competitors.

Well, players will soon have that opportunity — if they happen to be Gold Pass subscribers. That’s the subscription tier that gives access to extra content in the “free to start” game, and will be a requirement to join the beta

Naturally this will provoke ire among players who feel they are owed not just a free game, but a free game that gives them everything they want for free. And in fact they may eventually get that, but it’s probably smart for Nintendo to limit this experience at first to paying customers so they can stress-test, balance gameplay, and so on. A subpar multiplayer experience is a good way to turn off otherwise interested players.

Still, this feeds into a larger dissatisfaction among gamers with Nintendo’s online and multiplayer strategy. The subscription service required for many popular games on the Switch comes with a selection of Nintendo and Super Nintendo Games, but beyond that the benefits are minimal and features standard on other platforms for years — voice chat, for instance — are absent or long in coming.

At only $20 a year it’s hardly a big investment, but subscription fatigue is growing among tech-savvy consumers and they are cutting things out where they can. Hopefully Nintendo’s offering will solidify and survive.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion

Google will pay $7.35 per share for the wearables company — an all-cash deal that values Fitbit at $2.1 billion.

While Google has invested plenty in its own in-house development, buying Fitbit represents a step-change, and the opportunity to take advantage of years of effort focused specifically on the wearables category.

2. Apple TV+ now live, with one year free for new iOS, Apple TV and Mac purchases

At launch, you’ll find “The Morning Show,” “See,” “For All Mankind,” “Dickinson,” “Snoopy in Space,” “Ghostwriter” and “Helpsters,” as well as the documentary feature “The Elephant Queen” and the talk show “Oprah’s Book Club.” Some of these offer the first three episodes at launch, while others include the full season.

3. Sidewalk Labs (Alphabet’s grand experiment in smart cities) will move forward with Toronto project

Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto (the regulatory body overseeing the project) have come to an agreement that will limit the scope of the Sidewalk development — intended as a proving ground for the latest thinking in sustainable design — and make the company work more closely with oversight agencies on the construction of the 12-acre parcel.

4. Altria writes down $4.5 billion from its investment in Juul

That’s roughly one-third of the $12.8 billion that the tobacco giant had invested into Juul a little less than one year ago.

5. EHang, maker of autonomous flying shuttles, files for $100 million IPO

The company, which has been flying demonstration flights with passengers on board for a while now, is gearing up to launch its first commercial service in Guangzhou after getting approval from local and national regulators to deploy its drones in the area.

6. Japanese instant-credit provider Paidy raises $143 million from investors, including PayPal Ventures

This is the largest investment to date in the Japanese financial tech industry, according to data cited by Paidy, and brings the total investment the company has raised so far to $163 million.

7. Announcing TechCrunch’s new commenting system

There are a bunch of new features that you can read about in the post, but what I’m really hoping is that this makes a big dent in the spam.

Climate risk including extreme events and the related pressures our environment are fundamentally affecting the way business and governments operate – both tactically and strategically. Increasing climate volatility is causing food supply disruptions, and increasing pressure on Enterprises (including financial institutions, insurers, producers) to disclose what’s going on.

The trouble is, while there is a lot of data about all this, its complexity, incompleteness and sheer volume is too vast for humans to process with the tools available today. So just as the climate changes, we are faced with ‘data chaos’. Equally, other parts of the world suffer from data scarcity, making it much harder to provide useful and timely analysis.

So the challenge is to address these issues simultaneously. So a new startup, Cervest, has created an AI-driven platform designed to inform the decision-making capabilities of businesses, governments and growers in the face of increasing climate volatility.

Cervest, has now closed a £3.7m investment round to fund the launch of its real-time, climate forecasting platform.

The round was led by deep-tech investor Future Positive Capital, with co-investor Astanor Ventures. The seed-stage funding round brings the company’s total funding to more than £4.5m.

Built on three years of research and development by a team of scientists, mathematicians, developers and engineers, Cervest says its Earth Science AI platform can analyze billions of data points to forecast how changes in the climate will impact the future of entire countries right down to individual landscapes.

It does this by combining research and modeling techniques taken from proven Earth sciences – including atmospheric science, meteorology, hydrology and agronomy – with artificial intelligence, imaging, machine learning and Bayesian statistics.

Using large collections of satellite imagery and probability theory, the platform can identify signals, or early-warning signs, of extreme events such as floods, fires, and strong winds. It can also spot changes in soil health, and identify water risk.

Cervest says the platform could do such things as reveal to a multinational the optimum location to build a new factory; warn a wheat grower that their crop yield isn’t expected to meet its targets; or used by insurers to help them set premiums for the next 12 months.

The team comes from a network of more than 30 universities, including Imperial College, The Alan Turing Institute, Cambridge, UCL, Harvard and Oxford, and has published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

A beta version of the platform is due to launch in Q1 2020.

Iggy Bassi, Founder & CEO, Cervest said: “Our goal is to empower everyone to make informed decisions that improve the long-term resilience of our planet. Today decision-makers are struggling with climate uncertainty and extreme events and how they are affecting their business operations, assets, investments, or policy choices.”

Sofia Hmich, Founder, Future Positive Capital said: “With reports suggesting we have fewer than 60 years of farming left unless drastic action is taken, the need for science-backed decisions could not be greater. Businesses and policymakers hold the key to change and with access to Cervest’s proprietary AI technology they can start to make that change a reality at low cost – before it’s too late.”

Bassi previously ran the impact-led agribusiness, GADCO, which was supported by Acumen Fund, Soros, Gates Foundation, World Bank, and Syngenta. Its impact featured in UNDP, World Economic Forum, FT, Guardian and Huff Post. He previously built a software company focused on data analytics.

Cervest was inspired by Bassi’s experience building a farm-to-market agribusiness whilst confronting first-hand the impacts of climate and natural resource volatilities.

The Cervest team includes 8 scientists and 4 PhDs. Between them, they have published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers with more than 3000 citations in high-profile titles including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Statistical Society.