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Last February, Regrow Ag founder and CEO Anastasia Volkova darted from a meeting with investment firm Galvanize Climate Solutions to the home of Regrow’s COO, Manal Elarab. She wanted to share the news that the firm was planning to underwrite a Series B for Regrow, a tech platform that helps such companies as Nutrien, Bayer, Cargill, and John Deere reduce their carbon footprint by identifying the farmers and tools that will make their supply chains more regenerative. But Elarab had a different announcement to make. “She said, ‘Have you seen the news?’ ” Volkova recalls. “ ‘Russia just invaded Ukraine.’ ”
Volkova, who grew up in southeast Ukraine, a few hundred miles from the Russian border, says that she went from “being on the highest high professionally” to “spending the night thinking, This might be my last conversation with Mom.” In the following months, as she worked to extricate her mother from Zaporizhzhia, a city that was being bombed repeatedly by the Russians, Volkova was raising money for Regrow and inking deals with General Mills and Kellogg’s, establishing Regrow as a big player in regenerative agriculture.
An issue that big companies in particular have with trying to reduce carbon use is that it’s hard to manage what they can’t measure. Regrow removes the guesswork, mapping how changes in suppliers, farm-management practices, and land use will impact emissions and soil carbon, arming companies with more accurate CO2 baselines. Regrow’s model was recently approved by the Climate Action Reserve, the leading carbon-offset registry.
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