George Darrah

I was born a Londoner, but within a year my parents had whisked us off to the farming heartland of East Anglia to escape the pollution. My parents were always self-starters– since I can remember my dad was running his company and my mum putting her career as an artist on-hold to run the household. Me and my 5 siblings grew up immersed in this wild learning environment – I now look back and see our house was practically a library and outdoor education facility…!  

I think that this context – of physical and business risk taking, of charting your own course with creativity and courage, and always being close to nature, definitely laid the foundations for what fires me up now: working with founders building genuinely venture-scale start-ups fusing technology and nature. Giving us information we’ve never had before to dramatically improve how we extract, grow and manufacture food, materials and medicines. We’ll start seeing nature valued for its information not just biomass, such as it’s vast and mainly untapped genetic database. Everything that’s happening with AI, robotics, sensors fits directly into this – making it way cheaper to acquire, interpret and action nature’s intelligence.