Meet The Founder – An Interview With Brianna Dickey
Listen to a very special episode of the Founders Live podcast where our founder and CEO, Brianna Dickey, details her journey to CropConex.
CropConex Founder and CEO, Brianna Dickey, had a dream of working with agricultural communities worldwide. Her primary objective was to support the economic development of farmers by directly connecting them to international markets.
Taking her love of coffee and international ambitions, she became inspired by the possibility of using business as a force for sustainable development. She set off to work as a strategy consultant with some of the biggest names in the international development sector, with her journey taking her across Columbia, Panama, Ethiopia, Honduras, and Tanzania.
While having the privilege of working alongside coffee farmers and foreign governments, she uncovered the inefficiencies bound within the pre-existing agricultural systems. She came face to face with the lack of collaboration, antiquated trading methodologies, and logistical inefficiencies, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the current system was broken. After 3 years living abroad she learned the hidden costs of logistics inefficiencies in the supply chain, absorbing up to 40% of the product’s export value. She uncovered a slurry of intermediaries in the middle of the supply chain that operates in informal and disorganized markets and saw the massive opportunity to optimize these connections.
Finding herself frustrated with the existing platforms, Brianna set out to find an efficacious remedy by creating software that would streamline workflows, increase communication, and simplify global trade processes. While having acquired the tools and logic from leading operations at a Silicon Valley tech startup, she was inspired to create a space where collaboration could lead to profitable agribusinesses; thus, CropConex was born.
In her efforts to help make agricultural trade equitable, supply chains efficient, and food systems traceable, she is creating space for digital commerce to become the future of inclusive economies. Inspired by the realization that technology could unlock greater access and opportunity for all, this became deeply embedded in everything CropConex does and is at the heart of what drives us forward.
