Investing in AgriTech to End Hunger

Jaleh Daie, Ph.D, believes nobody should go hungry. So, she is intentionally moving the needle on agricultural technology within the Silicon Hills.

By Ruvani de Silva
Photos by Romina Olson
Styling by Asma Parvez, looks curated from Jaleh’s personal wardrobe
Shot on Location at Hotel Ella

Jaleh Daie is “big picture person.” With a twinkle in her bright, inquisitive eyes, it’s easy to see this as we sit, sipping zesty margaritas on the terrace at her country club in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. Daie has an impressively high-flying, ground-breaking and diverse career, with a remarkable ability to never lose sight of the big picture at the heart of her many achievements. Daie is currently putting this skillset to use to tackle one of the most significant environmental issues of our time – global food security, biotech and sustainability in agriculture.

Meeting the first woman to serve on the U.S. Space Foundation board of directors, inaugural inductee of the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and former advisor to the administration of three presidents (among Daie’s long list of professional achievements) should be intimidating, yet it’s anything but. Daie is relaxed, her directness refreshing and her comments laced with a delightful sense of humor. Immaculately turned out in classic monochrome, with a black lace-trimmed sleeveless blouse and tailored pants topped with a crisp white shirt, all set off with a statement on-trend gold rope necklace, Daie’s passion for fashion shines. It’s easy to imagine Daie in her favorite social settings; enjoying opera, international cuisine and hosting her renowned tea parties. Nonetheless, Daie exudes a sense of authority – the kind that comes from working hard and succeeding, which is exactly what she has done.

As Managing Partner at Aurora Equity venture investment, Daie leads investing in biotech. With Band of Angels investment group, Daie is Chair and Founder of their AgFoodTech special interest group, channeling her extensive skills and experience garnered in academia, government and corporate advisory roles, consulting, NFP funding and more. Her mission is to lead investment in cutting-edge food sustainability technology with the hope of promoting digitized, regenerative agriculture with a reduced carbon footprint. These are big goals, but Daie is more than ready to meet them. Daie is purposeful, productive and inquisitive. So it’s only fitting that her intentional work ethic, problem-solving mindset and deep resilience, combined with her in-depth industry knowledge make Daie the perfect person to determine how technology can help solve food insecurity and climate change. 

Cultivating a Varied Career

Born in Iran, Daie is one of nine siblings, but grew up in a household of 18 children, with her aunt, uncle and cousins next door.

“When you’re in a big family you learn to get along and be flexible because things change all the time,” she says. 

Daie’s aptitude for math and science swiftly led her on the road to academia. She came to the U.S. as a graduate student, studying plant biology. After securing an assistant professorship and as Henry Rutgers Research Fellow at Rutgers University, Daie fast-tracked to full professorship in just six years, half the average time, becoming the first woman elected as department chair and a Henry Rutgers Fellow before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Then, as now, Daie did not waste any time. She credits her work ethic partly to wanting to make her professors proud, but more significantly to her father, whom she describes as her hero.

“If I have any success, it is because of my father,” she says. “He told me I could do anything I wanted. You don’t know that – but when your father says it, it goes without question.”

That determination was intrinsic when Daie took the unexpected decision to switch career paths while at the top of her academic game.

“When I tell people that I voluntarily gave up tenure with a huge lab, students and infinite job security, people thought I had gone off the deep end,” she says, laughing. 

But Daie is an innately curious person, and a two-year sabbatical in Washington D.C. in policy and federal agencies as well as NGOs had whetted her appetite for a broader career path.

“I had bigger ideas and wanted to do bigger things,” she explains.

For Daie, her open-mindedness and flexibility learned in childhood paired with her father’s philosophy of being trustworthy, thorough and hard-working gave her the impetus to move out of academia and join the private sector.

“By the time I left academia I had already used different mental models to learn about different cultures of different organizations – and it worked,” she says.

Daie places a lot of emphasis on her willingness to try new things and grasp opportunities. “Half of success is to show up and I showed up – that was it!” she exclaims.

Blossoming through Challenges

While Daie is modest, yet proud of her successes, they have not come without setbacks and challenges – all of which she credits to making her stronger. As a young graduate student on the cusp of completing her Ph.D, Daie’s world was turned upside down when Iran was rocked by revolution and the ensuing hostage crisis prompted President Carter to issue an executive order, calling for the deportation of all Iranians in the U.S. – regardless of legal status. Daie emphasizes the enormous psychological strain caused by the order and how it changed her. She describes her younger self as a happy carefree young woman immersed in high-level academic work she was passionate about, who was suddenly at the mercy of the maelstrom of world politics, threatening her career goals and causing huge personal upheaval.

“The threat of being torn away from my research program and not finishing my Ph.D was about the worst thing,” she says, citing the crisis as her first big knock.

Despite the stress of putting up an ongoing legal challenge to the order, which lasted until President Reagen’s repeal two years later, while completing her Ph.D in a foreign country without familial support, Daie not only survived but thrived as her resilient nature came to the fore. 

“Resilience, that I didn’t know existed, kicked in and it came out in spades,” she says

This caused her to become more committed to her work and studies, propelling her into academia. Daie’s resilience became crucial to her success when the challenges of being a woman in the male-dominated field of scientific research were amplified as she moved higher up the academic ladder. Sexism was commonplace and Daie’s assertion of her stylish dress sense, which she describes as simple and classic, meant that she was consistently underestimated. 

“If you wore makeup, they didn’t think you were serious,” Daie says. “But you know what? It motivated me.”

Daie persisted in her work, confident of her talent. However, male colleagues, through laziness, jealousy or both, would steal her ideas and work. Daie describes sharing lab and study results in a collaborative manner, only to find male colleagues submitting her work for their research grants by passing it off as their own – something that would today be an immediate professional violation, but at the time was de rigor for a woman in science.

Now, Daie refuses to allow her ideas to belong to anyone but her.“If this happens at a board meeting, now I will say ‘Well John, I’m glad you like my strategy’ and make it clear that it was my idea,” she says, steely with determination. “One of the advantages of getting old is you don’t take crap any more!”

Picking the Best Path Forward

Daie’s refusal to be disrespected, paired with her curiosity and willingness to grab opportunities led her to venture capital. Daie combines her passion for and experience in biotech and food security with her skill at picking talent and ambition to create meaningful change. Daie breaks her role down for me, a venture capital newbie, in baby steps. She explains that Aurora Equity is a venture capital enterprise, where Band of Angels is an angel investment firm. Both invest in startups, but the key difference is angel investment focuses on early-stage development and personal funds, while venture capital raises external funds that come into play later down the line. Angel investment helps an enterprise develop proof of concept, evidence that it works, at which point venture capital companies will evaluate it and invest larger sums. Daie’s goal is all about thinking and achieving big. The investments she assesses are under the remit of creating meaningful change to global food supply and she is determined to find “tech that moves the needle.”

Agriculture is the least digitized industry, leaving it full of great opportunities for tech, Daie believes. A third of all greenhouse gasses comes from agriculture and food production, while traditional methods are creating excessive stress on the environment, causing climate change. Daie asserts that food is essential for human existence and is non-negotiable. So, she is looking for technology to solve these problems in a wide-reaching and long-lasting way.

Two of Daie’s most recent investments offer excellent examples of what moving the needle actually means. One is AI-powered vision technology that combines robotics and AI to distinguish between crops and weeds in a field. The tractor-mounted device zaps the weed with a laser while the robotic part squirts targeted fertilizer to the base of the crop so neither herbicide nor fertilizer are wasted.

“Precision that could save farmers so much money and protect rivers and waterways – this is significant change-making,” says Daie.

She is also invested in a company that uses seaweed to reduce methane production in cows by 90%. “So I can eat steak while being sustainable,” says Daie.

These are major, ground-breaking technologies, so I ask Daie how she selects projects that meet her highly ambitious criteria.

“The key elements [to selecting an investment]are to understand the tech, then pinpoint the problem you are solving,” she explains. “If you understand the problem well you can evaluate the tech against the problem.”

The next part ties into her experience in academia, where her ability to recognize talent was as essential, as it is now.

“You say who is the jockey, who is the team?” says Daie. “Do they know how to ride this horse to get first place? Then you bet on the jockey!”

With a career in plant biology as it relates to food security biotech and sustainability in agriculture and global food security, it’s clear that few people are better placed than Daie to understand these problems and pick the right jockey to come in first.

Brewing In a New Place

The willingness to bet high and leap into the unknown is also what brought Daie to Austin. At the height of the pandemic, Daie traded in her long-standing roots in her beloved San Francisco Bay area for a home in the Hill Country – sight-unseen – just before Elon Musk, as she enjoys sharing. Looking for a destination that would occupy her heart like San Francisco, her inspiration came from Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlight. She became increasingly intrigued as to why McConaughey swapped Hollywood for Austin.

“This guy is so solid and successful – Austin must offer him something that keeps him grounded, so I want to go to Austin,” Daie concluded.

On her first quick trip to look for a house she felt it was the right fit.

“The Hill Country looks just like Palo Alto – all hills and big oak trees,” she discovered. “Matthew McConaughey greenlighted me!” she laughs.

As a new Austinite arriving during the pandemic, socializing was limited. So, Daie employed her risk-taking and problem-solving skills, building her own apiary on her ranch where she now has a dozen hives with plans to expand. Daie enjoys this intimate, hands-on connection to sustainable and regenerative agriculture. She has become familiar to her bees, wearing protective garb only when handling the hives directly.

Interacting with nature on such immediate terms has its own deep draw for Daie, who loves long forest walks, and has found herself very much at home in the rich vegetation of the Hill Country. Daie shows me photos of her favorite spot on her ranch, where she has a stunning view across three lakes, and of the blanket of half a million Texas wildflowers she planted to feed bees from across the county. It is, she tells me, particularly beautiful in Spring

Pouring Into Adventure

With Daie’s heart now belonging to the Hill Country, she shares that her mantra remains the same on her next adventure: to be purposeful and productive. She has a desire to continue the important work that she is currently undertaking, and hopes to eventually dedicate more time to her already-substantial philanthropic commitments. Daie’s firm belief that nobody should go hungry hasn’t just fueled her professional work but her charitable endeavors. She has raised millions of dollars hosting galas for causes she believes in, supporting NFPs and volunteering with the UN World Food Program, where she is an advisor to the World Food Program Innovation Accelerator and with whom she recently undertook a voluntary sabbatical.

“[The UNWFP] is one organization that resonates deeply with me, across philanthropy, humanity, innovation, hunger and food production,” she says. “These are all angles that have formed my life and career and I love this role.”

As the sun slowly wanes over the rolling Central Texas hills and our interview draws to a close, I ask Daie what advice she has for young women wanting to follow a career in STEM based on her own experience, and she chuckles, eyes lit up, as she exclaims “Oh do I have advice for young women!”

Reputation, she believes, is everything.

“Earn it and protect it like it’s your child – but you have to earn it first, you can’t expect it – protect it like a lioness! A den mother!”

Despite the lateness of the day, Daie brims with passion as she emphasizes the importance of building a strong reputation of being trustworthy, honest, sincere and hard-working. These are Daie’s pillars to live by and to which she credits her successes in steering a career of such prestige and significance. By guiding sustainable investment along these same principles, Daie’s work offers the promise of working towards the right kind of climate solutions in the right way.

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