What do Regrow Ag CEO and cofounder Anastasia Volkova and Skims founder Kim Kardashian have in common?
Well, they’re both among the 20 industry leaders chosen by Time magazine for its list of the world’s 100 most influential companies.
Regrow began life in 2016, as part of Sydney University’s “Inventing the Future” innovation program. Its Ukrainian-born founder and aeronautical engineer Dr Anastasia Volkova – she has a PhD in autonomous drone navigation – moved to the US from Australia in 2020 to drive the company’s growth in that market.
Last year the US-based Australian agtech startup raised $50 million in a Series B to help the farming sector meet net-zero targets.
US agriculture produces around 10% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and Time recognised Dr Volkova’s efforts to address that.
Regrow Ag is a SaaS platform to help food and agriculture companies to achieve net-zero carbon goals in their supply chains. It also verifies their progress. Food and agriculture accounts for around 26% of global carbon emissions. The startup counts food sector giants such as Kellogg’s, Cargill, and General Mills among its client base.
“Agriculture and climate are in a bit of a vicious cycle,” Volkova told Time in her profile for the top 100.
“Climate is affecting agriculture negatively by introducing more volatility. And agriculture is affecting climate in a negative way with practices that are not very sustainable.”
Also making the cut as one of Time’s “Disruptors” of corporate life was Australian design unicorn Canva, alongside Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the US tech company that developed ChatGPT.
Time pointed to Canva’s customer grown exceeding 110 million users by the end of 2022 alongside providing the software tools free to 400,000 nonprofits and 35 million students and teachers globally.
“In 2022, Canva emerged as a major work-software competitor with a visual bent, expanding from a design platform for social media graphics to AI-powered tools and a workplace suite capable of going toe to toe with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace,” the Time citation said.
“Last fall the company launched its Visual Worksuite software package (from documents to presentations, videos, websites, and whiteboards); a new text-to-image app; and Magic Write, an AI-powered writing assistant.”
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