2019 Larta Ag Innovation Showcase
Karen Karp debuted the findings of “Money Where Our Mouths Are” at Larta Institute’s 11th Annual Ag Innovation Showcase (AIS) in Minneapolis on September 10, 2019.
The theme of this year’s showcase was “Convergence”—defined as the connections between food production, environment, and health. The event provided an intimate venue for industry leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs to form relationships and engage in substantive discussions that will enable innovative solutions coming to market for consumer, social, commercial, and environmental benefit. Participants included early-stage companies, agribusiness leaders, and representatives from an array of investment organizations.
The common theme across the span of AIS has been global and national issues related to soil health, food production, food sustainability, food waste and food security. Another commonality: The predominant demographic of participants and presenters have been white men. Committed to changing this dynamic, Rohit Shukla, Larta’s CEO, along with Agriculture Practice Director, Bandhana Katoch, invited the MWOMA team to begin to chart a new path.
About 35 participants filled a classroom to hear Karen Karp provide an overview of the MWOMA initiative, and it couldn’t have been a better venue to debut the database of deals made to women across Agri-Food Tech over the last six years, together with facilitating a conversation among four female founders/CEOs, an investment company representative, and Rohit himself.
Some of the issues that were brought up by panelists included themes that are beginning to become common throughout this work: Ketos’ Meena Sankaran expressed her frustration that, “Even though our solution was IoT plus Water plus Data Analytics, we would keep getting put in the bucket of ‘maybe Impact’, or ‘maybe become a non-profit because it’s water,’” which she interpreted as dismissive of her deep experience as an engineer and Ketos’ proven hardware solution for the pressing needs of almost any farmer.
Step One Foods’ Elizabeth Klodas and Sankaran said they did not see women-run funds as the solution to the problem, agreeing with the MWOMA team that a “parallel system” of women funders funding women-run enterprises is not the answer to the access gap.
Klodas and Anuvia Nutrient’s Amy Yoder have also experienced being dismissed by funders because they don’t fit into any single category. Klodas’s business sits between healthcare and food-tech, while Yoder’s is both software and fertilizer, which they said gives investors permission to dismiss them out of hand as an “easy out.”
The distinct benefits that women bring to their companies are simply not understood, much less valued. Yoder described hers as being able to “understand the whole story, how the pieces work together, along with the financials. It’s that diversity of thought that is not valued.” Shukla agreed, saying, “So many aspects of ag and food are changing. There is a considerable amount of intuition that I associate with female entrepreneurs, which cannot be understated. It goes way beyond [spreadsheet] modeling.”
Jessica Murphy of S2G Ventures, a supporter of MWOMA, said that their interest in this work stems from believing that unconscious bias prevents progress on their organization’s goals of contributing to a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system.
The 2019 session itself shifted the balance of the showcase, as 83% of the session attendees were women. AIS has been at the forefront of bringing thought leaders and influencers in the field of agriculture and related industry to initiate dialogue and drive collaborations domestically and internationally. This year’s dialogue included putting women front and center in the conversation. One of the men who attended this session said that, “having these numbers puts urgency to something I thought was a problem.”