The idea for agritech startup Gardin came to physicist Sumanta Talukdar in summer of 2019, after consuming a very bad batch of Tesco tomatoes. “They looked great. Nice, round, perfect shape – very, very red,” he says. “But when you ate them, they tasted of nothing.”
At a conference on plant science in Cambridge the next day, he struck up a conversation with Eric Ober, a leading crop physiologist at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. “I said, ‘Eric, how do you measure the goodness of food?’” he says. By goodness, Talukdar didn’t just mean the food’s appearance, but everything else, such as its nutritional density, quality and taste. Well, Ober replied, we don’t. Food producers use few metrics to judge a crop; mostly cosmetic – such as colour, shape or size – and not much else.
Talukdar immediately saw a gap in the market. “Here is one of the oldest and largest industries in the world, not measuring your product,” he says. He equates it to BMW not checking its cars before they come out of the factory.
So Talukdar founded Gardin, a startup that combined an optical remote sensing system and machine learning to develop a sensor, about the size of a teacup and costing around £70, that can effectively listen to what a plant is saying. The sensor can tell the plant is suffering from a pathogen outbreak, or it needs more water, or if it could benefit from a certain nutrient and inform the grower who can then act accordingly. Talukdar compares it to a GP taking your pulse during a checkup.
He believes that by listening to the signals from plants as they grow, farmers can drastically improve their crop yields, reduce their waste and get a higher quality, better tasting and healthier end product. If you know what a plant needs in real time, you can adjust how you care for it, he says. “If you can measure the right things really well, you can optimise.”
The fundamental technology the sensor is based on isn’t exactly new, he says. But until now, it’s been prohibitively expensive and too complex for mainstream use. What Gardin has done is put the technology into a fist-sized device that can take these measurements quickly, cheaply and in a real-world environment.
Crop variation keeps food producers up at night – a bland crop of peaches can ruin a week’s stock. And with climate change altering growing conditions and triggering extreme weather events, variance will be a growing problem. Earlier this year, Gardin ran pilot trials with supermarket chains, food producers and vertical farms. The company was able to show them how the technology could help save on operating costs, lower carbon footprints, increase yields, and reduce crop failure. And Gardin’s work has piqued the interest of others: at the beginning of 2021, the Oxford-based startup raised over £1 million in pre-seed funding, from investors including LDV Capital, Seedcamp and MMC Ventures which, Tulakdar says, was “fairly opportunistic”. The company is still small: it only has eleven employees. They had been working remotely long before the pandemic, but will be moving to a hybrid approach from next year, so team members will be able to work any way they choose to.
From 2023, the plan is for Gardin’s technology to move on to the food processing stage of the supply chain, scaling up aggressively in the meantime. “The whole reason for Gardin to exist is based on an assumption that the metrics that we're using today to quantify the value of food are wrong,“ he says. “We don't just see a gap in the market, we see a vital enabling piece missing.”
The dream, he says, would be to have the technology in every farm and major food production company across the world. This isn’t just for the rich people – it’s for everyone, he says. “What we are developing here today should be exploitable by producers across the globe.”
A single drop of blood from a fingertip is enough for this startup’s tech to detect whether someone has Ebola or Denge fever. Hutano Diagnostics, an Oxford University spinoff founded by Zimbabwean entrepreneur Atherton Mutombwera, is developing a disease diagnostic and surveillance platform for quick diagnosis, tracking and outbreak spread prediction of emerging and dangerous pathogens, which are infectious and recurring in the African Region.
Dr Cheerag Shirodaria’s startup has targeted one of the biggest killers in the UK: heart attacks. The University of Oxford spinoff, founded in 2018, has developed imaging diagnostics software capable of detecting a heart attack up to ten years before it happens. caristo.com
If the names Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill sound familiar, it’s because they developed the coronavirus vaccine treatment behind AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine at their University of Oxford and Jenner Institute spinoff startup Vaccitech. The company they founded in 2016 went from developing vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious diseases and cancer, such as hepatitis B, HPV and prostate cancer to a public listing earlier this year in New York, raising $111 million. vaccitech.co.uk
John Morton at University College London (UCL) and Simon Benjamin at the University of Oxford have worked since 2017 on a blueprint to build the most powerful computer on the planet. Last year, they had a breakthrough: they demonstrated quantum capability on silicon chips, providing an avenue for quantum chips being produced at scale. quantummotion.tech
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
