Agritech

Accelerating agritech in the UAE

Technical Review Middle East spoke to Zada Haj, CEO & co-founder and Katie Wachsberger COO & co-founder of venture builder and investment platform, DANA.

DANA has served as a platform for women‐led desert tech startups since its establishment.

MASDAR CITY, THE regional home of technology innovation and R&D in Abu Dhabi, and DANA, the Abu Dhabibased venture builder and investment platform, have signed an agreement for building the first Abu Dhabibased beta site.

The beta site will test the feasibility of early stage agritech projects that can be developed and piloted in Abu Dhabi, focusing on local and regional startups with solutions between the ‘preseed’ and ‘Series A’ development phases upon completion.

Operating for nearly two years, DANA –founded by three women – has served as a venture builder and investment platform for womenled desert tech startups since its establishment.

“DANA Venture Builder offers the startups access to an international network of experts, addressing the teams’ needs from the technical to the financial, through to governance and company structure. The emphasis on inhouse Proof of Concept allows us to work with the companies to ensure their feasibility across the board, increase their valuation, and establish market inroads at the earliest stage possible, reducing the risk for a notoriously capital and timeintensive sector, explained Zada Haj, DANA’s CEO and cofounder.

When completed, the site will consist of 1,700 sq m of greenhouses, net houses, and open field farming, displaying diverse approaches to the sustainable production of crops in the desert. Furthermore, the beta site will focus on developing solutions with potential to overcome water scarcity, irrigation, greenhouse cooling, soil cultivation and regeneration challenges, as well as testing the resilience of new seed varieties.

The beta facility will promote local innovation and provide a nextgeneration platform for startups to showcase the potential of their homegrown agrifood solutions ahead of market entry. It will also ensure companies from the UAE and wider MENA region have the infrastructure and guidance required to overcome food security challenges and resource scarcity in desert locations.

“DANA was born out of a need to promote practical, scalable techbased solutions that can act as game changers in terms of altering consumption and production patterns, working hand in hand with corporate entities to make sure that the solutions in our pipeline are not only technologically feasible, but simple to implement. The choice to use this strategy to empower women was an obvious one, as one out of four entrepreneurs in the climatetech sectors is a woman (in contrast to one in seven in more established, softwarebased sectors of technology business),” said Haj.

“We find women to be natural leaders in innovating solutions for the desert climate as we are naturally mindful of the collective. Whether by nature or nurture, we tend to measure our success not exclusively based on financial ROI, but also on positive impact on our surroundings. This is especially strategic as impact investing and ESG taxonomy become increasingly significant in the global economy’s measurements of corporate success,” she added.

“Promoting female leadership is also a means of bringing our entire region ahead of the development curve, as GDP would increase by 36 %, if women participated equally in the regional economy , yet according to the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2021, the region will need 143 years to close the gender gap at its current rate of progress. By giving more women the tools they need to succeed – thus empowering more women to strive for success in the business world –we believe our mission is inherently aimed at benefiting the collective. After all, DANA itself is a womenled venture, so it is obvious that our success is also measured by the change we instill in those around us,” Katie Wachsberger, DANA’S COO and cofounder observed. ■