The Grantham Institute’s Linsey Wynton speaks to Alex Park, Founder and CEO of Biofonic, a climate startup that uses acoustic sensors and AI to accelerate sustainable land management. This blog is part of our series of insights from leading women in cleantech innovation.
As a child growing up in Texas, Alex Park was fascinated by nature and food. But it was only after a career in data insights at Fortune 100 companies in Silicon Valley that she decided to combine her skills and interests to invent a technology to help farmers improve the soil and grow food sustainably.
The planet is losing 24 billion tons of valuable soil ecosystems each year (over three tons for every person on the planet), mainly because of chemicals and intensive agriculture. Concerned about this, Alex founded Biofonic, which uses acoustic sensors to unearth insights from the soil so farmers can manage crops more sustainably.
Soil is mysterious – although it is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems and home to more than half of all Earth’s species, it’s also the least understood – Alex Park
Biofonic was conceived as a final group thesis when Alex was studying on Imperial’s MSc Innovation Design Engineering. On graduating, she joined Undaunted’s The Greenhouse programme, and the company recently won first prize at their Greenhouse Demo Day. Let’s find out more about her journey so far:
Tell me about your early career in Silicon Valley?
I’ve always been impact driven. I enjoy working on things that have real value in the world. I did a business degree, studying finance and marketing. At that time big data was the keyword. I fell in love with data while doing undergraduate research with a professor, using large data sets to understand human behaviour like product purchase decisions.
I worked for over 13 years in tech and the main link across my roles was the intersection of data, technology and human behaviour. I started at Dell, where I built a successful data-driven customer loyalty programme. Then I moved to Google, where I was working as an insights analyst on a specialist team supporting consumer products like Maps, Drive and the Chrome browser. I helped to launch new products, interpreting massive data sets on user behaviour and feedback so product teams could understand what to prioritise for development.
It was great to help improve products with billions of users, but I wanted to be more impactful for society. I moved to Verily Life Sciences, helping to develop and test new capabilities for wearable devices that monitor the progression of Parkinson’s disease and undertake advanced sleep analysis. It was thrilling to expand my work towards concept stage development, and to see a direct impact on people’s lives.
What led you to founding a business to help farmers to deal with climate change?
I’ve always been as creative as I am quantitative and technical and I found the Innovation Design Engineering programme at Imperial, jointly run with Royal College of Art (RCA). It’s one of the few globally that offers equal parts deep tech engineering and design. So I applied, got in, packed up my things and moved to London.
Biofonic was our final group thesis. My team formed out of a shared passion for solving sustainability issues in food systems. We explored everything from robotics to vertical farming, spoke to dozens of experts and researched virtually every nascent technology that could be applied in that space. Nothing sparked any ideas and, since over 90% of our food is still produced through conventional farming, we decided to talk to some farmers.
We visited almost every farmers’ market in London, before finding one that was manned by actual growers, run by an organisation called Growing Communities. Through this, I convinced a farmer one of them to let us live on his farm for a few days. The team helped him prepare for market the following weekend in exchange for asking him a million questions. He introduced us to his farmer friends and those early conversations, particularly with organic and sustainable growers, informed the insights that led to Biofonic.
What did you learn and how did this help shape what Biofonic does?
Soil is mysterious – although it is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems and home to more than half of all Earth’s species, it’s the least understood. Many of the farmers we spoke to had paid for soil and DNA sampling, and they still couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. From my background with wearable devices, I knew the power that a simple indicator like heart rate, when measured continuously, could have on revealing systemic health. So, I began looking for similar indicators for soil.
I got into a deep wormhole on earthworms and how they are an excellent proxy for soil health. They can’t survive in less-than-ideal soil conditions, but they also create ideal soil conditions. They’re incredible ecosystem warriors for soil. They draw down a lot of carbon, aerate soil, and provide ideal conditions for other organisms to thrive. So, I ordered some worms from wormsdirect.co.uk. Then I took a shotgun microphone from the RCA Media Lab, shrink wrapped it, chucked it into the soil and discovered that worms are noisy.
We started prototyping from there. At the time, there were less than a handful of researchers in the world who had applied eco-acoustics to subsurface soil for this purpose. By then we had expanded our farmer network. We tested at FarmEd, an educational and working farm with a conventional control plot and regenerated plots. I could immediately hear the difference between the regenerated soil and conventionally farmed soil just with my ears!
Being a founder is hard. Just having a viable business idea is not enough. You need to know yourself and your motivations for being a founder, and clarify your vision for what success means to you.
Why is this technology so needed?
We are in dire need of more accessible, intelligent farming systems to regenerate soil. We are on track to erode 90% of our global soils by 2050, when it’s estimated we will still rely on soil for 90% of our food supply.
We urgently need to accelerate soil regeneration, but we are missing the tools to do so. Soil is a complex system of interactions happening at often microscopic scale but influenced by macro-level factors like farming methods and environmental conditions. To best understand this kind of complex system, we need large amounts of continuous data to support more advanced computational models – which isn’t possible from the status quo of episodic soil sampling.
This is the gap that Biofonic is aiming to fill. With trend level data across multiple factors of biological and physical soil dynamics, we can reveal actionable insights. Ultimately, what we are trying to achieve is an ecologically driven intelligence and decision engine for land management.
Would you ever have guessed your career path would take you to working on soil and can you share some journey highlights?
I was always an outdoorsy kid, constantly climbing in trees and mucking around in dirt. When it rained, other kids ran inside, but I went out to look at worms and slugs and bugs that came up. I also loved growing vegetables and fruit in our garden. My mother recently reminded me that when I was in grade school, I took a career assessment that said I’d make a good entrepreneur, CEO or farmer. I had to ask my parents what an entrepreneur was.
The continual highlight for me is the reception we get from the farming and agricultural research community. I love working with our partners, we have an incredible network of amazing people helping us! From the outset, I wanted to ensure we weren’t coming in as city kids, presuming we knew more than farmers did. We have been very humble about not knowing the farming side but have always wanted to own being the outsider and own our expertise, which is more on the deep technical side. That has proven a good strategy.
Have you faced any barriers as a woman CEO and what advice would you offer other female founders?
Having worked in tech for many years, I’m accustomed to being in male-dominated workplace environments. We are 100% grant funded thus far, and I owe our grant success to the strength and breadth of our research partnerships. One could argue that nurturing community and collaboration is stereotypically feminine, so if anything, this has been a core strength!
We are lucky to have secured sizable grant funding, which has enabled a huge amount of exciting research and development. With this I was able to hire a team, and it’s been so much fun to see how their genius has accelerated our progress. I’m now preparing for our pre-seed fundraise. I reckon as a woman, I will have to be much more prepared, but otherwise I intend to be authentic and transparent.
Being a founder is hard. Just having a viable business idea is not enough. You need to know your personal and company North Star – know yourself and your motivations for being a founder and clarify your vision for what success means to you. This will influence everything, from who you hire to your funding strategy. So, if there’s any single most impactful thing you can do, carve out the time for deep self-reflection and invest in understanding yourself and your intentions. It will be time well spent.
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