Ashwin Madgavkar

Founder, Ceres Imaging

Ashwin Madgavkar is the Founder and CEO of Ceres Imaging. He grew up in Texas and early in his career worked as an electrical engineer and strategy consultant, primarily in the energy industry.

In 2012, while working for a leading Brazilian sugarcane ethanol producer, Ash saw that large-scale agriculture operations often still make blanket decisions in areas like fertilizer and pesticide use, leading to waste, productivity losses, and environmental damage. In surveying an agribusiness opportunity in Colombia, he saw further evidence of a need in the industry for advanced data sources.

A solution to those problems began to take shape for Madgavkar in his time at Stanford, where he earned an MBA and took earth sciences classes that related to his engineering interests.

He learned about phenomenal advances in spectral imaging that Stanford researchers were applying to study Amazonian tree species and microclimates.  Why couldn’t that advanced technology be applied to help farmers improve their yields, while saving water in drought-prone areas like California?

Madgavkar founded Ceres in 2013 and recruited a talented core team of scientists to develop the hardware, software, and know-how that has made the company fast-growing and well-loved by customers.