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Matt Barnard is the co-founder of Plenty (a Softbank-backed vertical farming company that seeks to feed the world in the most sustainable way possible. He speaks to us about creating, at scale, autonomous farms run by robots, to produce the most delicious produce available on the market.
Matt Barnard seemed destined to become a farmer. For one, he comes from a family of farmers in Wisconsin – seven generations and counting. But there was one slight wrinkle to his likely path – growing up, Barnard was more drawn to technology. That passion took him from the Midwest to Silicon Valley.
But after working in the wireless telecom industry, Barnard felt the call of the land…in the form of a problem – how do you feed the world when resources, like water and arable land, are dwindling while the world’s population is going up? That brought Barnard back into agriculture, but with a twist – this time, he’s working on a vertical farm – which he thinks is the answer to that problem. Some of the world’s richest people agree.
The company Barnard founded – Plenty – is a unicorn backed by Softbank’s Masa Son, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos. Through it all, Barnard’s story is rooted in one simple passion – growing food sustainably to feed the world.
Co-founder
Matt is the co-founder of Plenty an indoor, vertical farm that produces peak summer flavors year round in a sustainable environment without chemicals or GMOs. Before Plenty, Matt worked to found, build, grow and scale multiple high-growth technology companies in the areas of core network, CDN, telecom, water, electric and gas utilities in addition to corporate development work for Nest, Dropcam, Mightybell and others. Matt’s roles included Whalen & Company where Matt served as President and COO of a $100MM specialty engineering firm that designed and deployed the core networks for all major wireless carriers in the U.S., Search Fund Capital which was founded by Matt by raising $15MM to head a single-industry private equity fund, 523 Capital where he served as Managing Operating Partner of a fund that delivered an 80% annual return to investors, and SmartSynch – a cellular smartgrid company where he worked as VP of Deployment to scale the firm to a 100% growth rate before it was acquired by Itron for $100MM. Matt earned an MS from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and both a BA and BM from Northwestern University.
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