From $500 To $50 Million: Sustainable Agriculture Technology

Green sat down with Sanjay Kumar Rajpoot, Agriculture, Healthcare, and Energy entrepreneur who founded FarmX and scaled the company to an international, $50 million dollar business, becoming a leading voice in sustainable agriculture technology.

Tell us about your background in sustainable agriculture technology: 

I have a Studied Chemical & Nanotechnology Engineering, Physics & Computer Science at USC. I have been working in AgTech since college, and founded FarmX with my own $500 in my garage. FarmX now is all over California helping farmers save water and improve yield using novel artificial intelligence and an IoT suite that he architected, the company is worth ~$50M now. 

I spent the last 2 years working at Exponential Growth Capital where I have been worked on vertical farming: food crops, pharmaceutical crops, and shrimp.  My work is fundamentally increasing the productivity and sustainability of humanity at large in some of Agriculture’s biggest problems.

I have been working in AgTech since age 17 when I saw Singaporean roof top farming. 
I went went to 4 community colleges in parallel taking 30 units per semester before transferring to USC and researching AgTech Entrepreneurship at UC Davis, UC Berkeley & Stanford.  I lived out of my suitcase in 20 places in 2 years to found FarmX through Berkeley SkyDeck Incubator, Village Capital Social Impact Accelerator, Imagine H20 Water Accelerator, and RRoyse Law AgTech Incubator

What caused you to get into your industry? 

I saw ways to make humanity more sustainable and less resource-intensive and think it is necessary to make change in the world for humanity to survive.

What trends are you seeing in your industry? 

Vertical farming was up 100% year over year for the past few years but has been down 80% this year due to COVID.

What is one Action Item for our listeners and viewers to take away from this conversation? 

Search for high-quality food at your local supermarket, seek out hydroponic and locally grown foods that avoid high transportation and storage carbon footprint. Talk to your local supermarket to see how you can buy locally sourced food.

What is a fun fact about you? 

Rajpoot slept on staircase landing and worked as a janitor for a summer in college to fund his first AgTech technology developments at USC.

Rajpoot studied MMA and almost went to military college to serve as a combat engineer or nuclear sub engineer.

Where do you see your industry ten years from now? 

Vertical farming globally, creating jobs locally in farming in every community growing food closer to where it is consumed with less resources.

Green wants to thank Sanjay Kumar Rajpoot for taking the time to share his knowledge of Sustainable Agriculture Technology.

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