Rikin Gandhi

Rikin Gandhi

Rikin Gandhi is co-founder of Digital Green, a global development organization that empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of digital technology and grassroots-level partnerships. Rikin began his career at Oracle, where he received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop. Later he joined Microsoft Research's Technology for Emerging Markets team in India, where he researched ways to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally.  In partnership with government ministries of agriculture and rural development, Digital Green uses peer-to-peer farming videos to increase the efficiency of agricultural extension services and a shared logistics to market service to boost farmer incomes.  Digital Green is building FarmStack as an open platform to enable the 2 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that it has already worked with to control and share their own data with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, Walmart Foundation, and others. Rikin has a bachelor’s in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, a master’s in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT, and is a licensed private pilot.