Matt Barnard

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.