Confessions of a conference attendee

Reviewing the Animal and World AgriTech events in San Francisco, March 2022

Good news: the AgriTech conferences last week in San Francisco were a big hit, and the exhibition hall was filled with high quality attendees from a mix of agricultural firms, venture capitalists, and ag-focused software startups. The bad news? Well, I must confess that I didn’t get to attend many sessions, because there were so many meetings taking place; before, during, and after the live show. Since the sessions are available on streaming for the next month or so, I’m hoping to catch up on the key ones I missed, but as a networking event, it was great, and the Rethink organizers did a good job in facilitating this.

We were able to reveal the imminent launch of our SWARM Challenge Modeler (watch out for the Press Release next week) and previewed the software to several attendees and media contacts. You can pre-register to use the personal edition here. There was also the opportunity to meet face-to-face with contacts we have only spoken to on video calls in the past two years. Apparently, I’m taller than I appear on zoom :)

After going to a handful of virtual events over the pandemic, we noticed most attendees are now much more comfortable with the event-related apps, and we had many meeting requests sent and received via this mechanism. Sad to say that conference food has not improved in the past two years, but the hotel has some good restaurants nearby – just a shame they were always closing by the time we managed to get there! 

A big thanks to everyone that came by our booth, scheduled a meeting, or joined in the lively conversation on Democratizing AI at our roundtable event. It was also good to catch up with some of our investors in person, including S2G Ventures who hosted a busy & productive evening social. We made some great connections and will be busy with follow-up activity for the next couple of weeks. If you didn’t get to speak with us or missed Animal or World AgriTech and want to catch up on our latest news, feel free to reach out. 

P.S. After watching the teams either side of us spend an hour each trying to assemble their ‘100-piece’ tubular stands, we can highly recommend the inflatable stand that Holly, our VP Marketing, procured for the event. It was a doddle to set up and take down.