No?
Druids? Beaker folk?
From AgFunder:
If you’ve ever walked the streets of Central London, you’ve probably walked those belonging to the Grosvenor family, particularly if you headed to London’s most upmarket neighborhoods. Many of the streets and squares of Mayfair and Belgravia are named after the family, and you may have even stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel — hopefully at someone else’s expense!
A household name in the UK, the Grosvenor family can trace its ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s cousin and today Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, is godfather to Prince George. No big deal then.
But what’s the link to foodtech?
Wheatsheaf Group. Don’t know them? If you’re reading AFN, maybe you should. They were one of the first investment groups to focus on agtech, and they have a cool $500 million to play with.
Where did Wheatsheaf come from?
In 2012, the Grosvenor Estate was looking for ways to diversify what’s largely a property business with land and real estate holdings across the globe and ensure its legacy for the next 1,000 years. It soon landed on food and agriculture.
“They were looking at how we could build exposure to another significant industry beyond property, and food and agriculture was a sector that had not yet been disrupted but faced many macro challenges,” Graham Ramsbottom tells AFN. “The opportunity for technology to impact the sector is vast.”Ramsbottom was approached by the Grosvenor Estate to build an agrifood investment team. He had identified agri-foodtech as an opportunity after managing rural properties, founding a farm consultancy and working for some of the UK’s biggest farmers and cooperatives, and then moving into sustainable development.Launching in 2012, well ahead of many of the most active agri-foodtech investors now, Wheatsheaf has since flown largely under the radar, despite making 20 investments including some big names in agri-foodtech such as AeroFarms in the US and Farmdrop in the UK. According to the website, the firm’s “operational, investment and development activities are implemented by over 2,500 people working across 34 countries.”...MUCH MORE
