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Sara Menker
Founder at Gro Intelligence
Sara Menker is an Ethiopian-born entrepreneur and the founder of Gro Intelligence, a technology company that uses artificial intelligence to forecast agricultural and climate trends.13 She founded Gro Intelligence in 2012 after working as a vice president in Morgan Stanley's commodities group.12
Menker's background includes:
- Education: B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and the London School of Economics, and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.13
- Career: Prior to founding Gro, she worked at Morgan Stanley, managing commodities risk and trading portfolios.12
- Achievements: Named a Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum, fellow of the Aspen Institute, and included in Time's 100 most influential people in 2021.148
Gro Intelligence, under Menker's leadership, developed a platform that harvests vast amounts of agricultural data, transforming it into actionable insights for various industries.3 The company aimed to address global challenges such as food security and climate change.5
However, recent developments have significantly impacted Menker's role and Gro Intelligence's operations:
- In February 2024, Menker was replaced as CEO of Gro Intelligence.78
- The company faced financial difficulties, unable to pay its staff and laying off 10% of its workforce in January 2024.7
- As of June 2024, Gro Intelligence announced it was shutting down after failing to secure additional financing.9
Despite these setbacks, Menker's work in bridging data gaps in the global agriculture sector and her efforts to address food security issues have been widely recognized.136
Highlights
Every year at Gro Intelligence, we measure the performance of our proprietary models against final government reporting and ground truth data, and we make our findings public.
Despite an extremely volatile year for climate and weather impacts on growing conditions, our 2023 performance analysis shows that Gro’s models accurately predicted yields, averaging between 92%-99% of final government reporting up to 10 months in advance.
Learn more about how our predictive models can help you anticipate risk and download our 2023 performance report here: https://bit.ly/3OhR1JA
Read more about the report in our latest blog, here: https://bit.ly/42eeFfK
In September, Gro teamed up with Google DeepMind to host an in-person roundtable on 'AI & The Future of Food Security'. The roundtable brought together top AI researchers, policymakers, academics and business leaders to assess how advances in AI have the potential to improve the productivity, resiliency, and equity of food systems.
I had the privilege of moderating our discussion, where we explored the potential for generative, LLM-based applications to foster a new and transformational democratization of food system information access and use.
Learn more about our insights here: https://bit.ly/46Ibvle and read more about DeepMind’s final report here: https://bit.ly/47SKegF
