About the panelists:

Ali Alomari Co-Founder, Cropsy Technologies

Ali is co-founder and CEO at Cropsy Technologies, an AgTech start-up based in Auckland that’s working with global enterprise winegrowers. While studying Ali envisioned a new way of growing the world’s food with a system that empowers growers to understand the needs of every plant. After completing his BE (Hons.) in Computer Systems Engineering at the end of 2018, he and co-founder Leila Deljkovic promptly founded Cropsy, starting with one of New Zealand’s largest horticultural exports; wine grapes. Cropsy’s mission is to deliver disruptive, scalable technology to every fruit grower to unlock the full potential of their land with insights that were impossible before.

Oscar Ellison – Product and Data Strategy, Levno

Oscar leads the product and data strategy at Levno. Levno is the leading provider in on-farm IoT in New Zealand with over 10,000 connected sensors. They have a range of on-farm sensors that provide insights back to farmers enabling them to farm smarter.

Kylie Hall  - Storyteller, Hectre

With a background in journalism, people projects, marketing, sales and customer engagement, Kylie brings an extensive toolkit to the Hectre team. As our Storyteller, she’s also our chief translator, taking all of the complex techo jargon involved in our world and making it simple for our customers to understand.  The lead host of The Co-Hort Podcast, a podcast series produced by Hectre, Kylie shines the light on the fruit growing industry and the challenging lives of those that strive to thrive within it, as they rise to the challenge of feeding an ever-increasing global population.

Casey Orr,  Solutions Architect, AWS

Casey is a Territory Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services. With a background in software development and engineering, Cloud is Casey’s passion and purpose. Casey has extensive experience helping customers take full advantage of the numerous flexible and dynamic services on the AWS platform; empowering businesses to innovate now and into the future.

Dan O’Brien – Venture Capital Business Development Manager, AWS

Dan is a Venture Capital Business Development Manager at AWS. With Agtech start-ups as a focus, his mission is to help Australian and New Zealand Agtech start-ups shine on the world stage by supporting them as they gain traction and scale up - with AWS at their wing. Dan has invested in start-ups at a VC in London, architected cloud and data analytics solutions in NZ and France, and raised capital at a high growth consumer internet start-up in Paris. Prior experience: Senior Solution Architect, AWS. Master Principal Sales Consultant at Oracle, NZ. Investment manager, Shackleton Ventures. CTO/co-founder, consumer internet start-up.

Tonie de Vries - Product Manager Emerging Technology/IoT, Spark New Zealand

With more than 30 years’ experience in deploying mobile technology in New Zealand from 1G to 5G Tonie is passionate about providing connectivity solutions to allow New Zealand/Aotearoa to thrive. Over the years he has worked for Telecom, Ericsson, Nokia and Spark. Tonie holds a Bachelor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (1st Class Honours) from the University of Canterbury.

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