The most important industry
deserves the most useful data
The agriculture ecosystem is technical and highly idiosyncratic. Demeter was founded to be the industry's single source of truth. We create, curate and reconcile the critical datasets that other sectors take for granted.
Meet the team
Building a modern data company for the world's most important industry takes a special kind of team. Demeter brings together agronomy, software engineering, AI, data science, research, geospatial and corporate finance experience.
Hugh Macfarlane
CEO & Founder
Hugh founded Demeter in 2024 after five years as a Founding Partner at JE Global, a food & ag investment group. He was previously a public equity investor and an M&A banker, focused on data companies.
He sits on the boards of Duck River Agriculture, Scindo, Wisecrop, Edafos & Adega das Tres Etapas.
Sean Summers
Research Engineer
Sean works at the intersection of data and engineering, playing a central role in building and scaling Demeter's data and platform. His expertise spans geospatial data, automation, and visualising complex datasets.
Lucas Kruitwagen
Machine Learning & Data Scientist
Lucas is a data scientist specialising in earth observation, remote sensing, and environmental risk analytics. He holds a DPhil from Oxford and has worked across research organisations and startups, including co-founding Oxford Earth Observation and serving as CTO at TransitionZero.
Alex Lydiate
Founding Engineer
Alex leads Demeter’s engineering team and is responsible for technical roadmap, platform architecture and development of the full technology stack. He was previously the software and systems architect for IATI, and an AI engineer at Dyson. He writes fiction and music.
Kevin Guy
Full-Stack Engineer
Kevin maintains Demeter's full technology stack and is responsible for front-end development, internal tooling and geospatial automation. He previously worked at DoorFeed in the UK and various startups in his native Germany, and spent the Covid years researching regenerative agriculture.
Mara Zalite
Marketing Lead
Mara leads Demeter’s brand and go-to-market strategy, shaping how the company positions and commercialises its data products and platform. She previously held senior marketing roles across tech and financial data brands.
Stuart Pettigrew
Lead Agronomist
Stuart has over 30 years' experience working on institutional-scale agricultural projects worldwide, including in Australia, Sweden and Portugal.
He spent five years in Afghanistan and Kosovo with the World Bank and HELVETAS.
Nothing worth doing is easy
Interested in joining our team? Send your CV and a short note
on why Demeter interests you to info@demeterdata.ag.
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