Rikin Gandhi
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Rikin Gandhi co-founded and is the executive director of Digital Green, a global development organization that empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of digital technology and grassroots-level partnerships. Rikin began his career at Oracle, where he received patents for designing linguistic search algorithms. Later, he joined Microsoft Research’s Technology for Emerging Markets team in India, where he researched ways to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally. There, he created Digital Green to use peer-to-peer farming videos to increase the efficiency of agricultural extension services. Digital Green is now building FarmStack as an open platform to enable the 2 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that it works with to control and share their own data with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, Walmart Foundation, and others. Rikin also co-founded Loop, a shared logistics to route farmer produce to markets that spun off from Digital Green. Rikin has a bachelor’s in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, a master’s in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT, and is a licensed private pilot.