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David Davies is the founder of AgUnity & creator of AgriUT, a solution to deploy smartphones and a digital Token to smallholder farmers to help them lift themselves out of poverty.
He was awarded the Future Agro Challenge (FAC) Global Agripreneur of the Year 2018 for his work as CEO of AgUnity for helping lift low-income farmers out of poverty. AgUnity provides a smartphone and blockchain solution that improves trust and cooperation for smallholder farmers and is also used as a platform for a range of problems including mobile banking for the financially excluded, and data collection for developed world farmers.
The work by David and AgUnity has been globally recognised by the likes of IFC World Bank, Mastercard Foundation, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Oxford University and more.
David Davies Interview Focus
David grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in outback South Australia, before spending most of his career working in technology for global investment banks. This included Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros, Nomura and a Global Head of Market Data Commercials at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore.
Before this, David travelled through Africa with UNESCO recording a documentary series. This opportunity enabled David to see how poverty and exclusion were powerful forces keeping many communities in cycles of bare subsistence.
Working for large banks some years later, David saw a world where money and power replaced empathy and humanity and it never added up. David also travelled to Japan where he founded a Mobiletech that was acquired by a company in the US and started a company in Singapore that was also acquired.
All of this led David to start AgUnity at a hackathon in London in 2016, where the founders were challenged to come up with a world-changing idea to increase the income for a billion people. Their solution was a low cost smartphone and a safe transaction record system powered by blockchain, to tackle financial and digital exclusion for remote, rural communities.
AgUnitys’ global technology platform empowers thousands of organizations working toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals to connect with ‘the last mile’ farmers and communities. This customised smartphone & OS solution serves as a technological ecosystem; providing the people living and working with remote food supply chains with practical, accessible tools to connect, establish effective lines of communication and ensure an ethical, accountable means of trade.
Widely recognized by major NGO's and studied at leading universities, my team at AgUnity are currently running projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific positively impacting farmer lives with profound and long-lasting effect.
In 2021, David and his team at AgUnity created an innovative special project to close the gap between farmer and consumer: AgriUT Foundation. This foundation was built as an independent charitable entity to complement the AgUnity smartphone platform for smallholder farmers.
