Sara Menker and Gro Intelligence Are Tackling Global Hunger on the Same Team
Wealthy women and children aren’t the only ones looking to Sara Menker and Gro Intelligence solutions to help them feed their families.
It is hard to imagine a more daunting goal than feeding a global population of over 7 billion people. But, when Gro Intelligence founder Sara Menker and her colleagues put that problem into focus, they discovered a solution: a platform that would allow people with little to no resources to leverage global, virtual kitchens in order to feed themselves, their families, and their communities. With help from the food industry and a number of other humanitarian organizations, Menker and her team are using blockchain technology to help people feed themselves and their families.
To date, Menker and her team have been successful in building their solution with more than 250 partners in over forty countries and over 35,000 people. In her keynote at the Gro Intelligence 2018 conference in Berlin, Germany, Menker detailed more of the details of Gro Intelligence’s ambitious goal to end global hunger by 2025.
Menker is a serial entrepreneur who started out in the high-tech sector. As an entrepreneur, she led her first startup, Soma Labs, which was a distributed storage technology company that was acquired by IBM. Soma Labs’ goal was to provide people with an affordable way to store and share large volumes of data, with the end goal of providing access to information that people would previously be unable to find.
During her stint at IBM, Menker launched and sold more than fifty companies. She later embarked on a full-time entrepreneurial career, working in Silicon Valley, while keeping the tech world at arm’s length. She was a product consultant at several companies developing blockchain and artificial intelligence solutions. She continued to raise capital and build new ventures through this time period — many of them at the time being backed by venture firms.
Menker started her own venture capital firm, Gro Intelligence, which she founded with her husband, Kevin Menker. In late 2016, she and Kevin were looking for a way to help people globally that faced a real problem or issue —