Claire Martin :
A lemon tree springs from the soil in Jason Aramburu’s backyard in Berkeley, Calif., alongside rose bushes, birds of paradise, strawberry plants and squash blossoms. The garden is thriving, but its upkeep requires almost no effort from Mr. Aramburu. Instead, a foot-high soil sensor does much of the work.
The plastic-and-stainless-steel device, topped by a tiny solar panel, determines the amount of water to be delivered to the garden each day, using Mr. Aramburu’s Wi-Fi network to communicate with a valve attached to his irrigation system. If the air is humid, or if rain is forecast, the valve limits or cuts off the supply. If the soil lacks nutrients, Mr. Aramburu receives an alert on a smartphone app telling him to add fertilizer. And it doesn’t hurt that the sensor initially analyzed the clay-filled dirt of his yard and recommended which plants would thrive there.
The soil sensor and the water valve are Mr. Aramburu’s creations; he will soon begin selling them through his new company, Edyn. But his plan for his business goes beyond enabling people in upscale ZIP codes to cultivate things like exotic kale and heirloom beets. He also intends to sell sensors to farmers in developing nations at a low cost to help them grow food more efficiently and sustainably.
Through Edyn, the 29-year-old Mr. Aramburu is trying to tackle the problems of drought and the global food shortage. Although the concept of for-profit companies addressing social issues isn’t new – hospitals are a longstanding example – entrepreneurs with a flair for humanitarianism were stymied by capital constraints until fairly recently. “They didn’t have access to the capital pools to start encouraging them, nurturing them and helping them think about what it takes to scale their businesses,” says Allen S. Grossman, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and a former professor of social entrepreneurship there.
But in recent years, such business efforts have been stoked by both venture capitalists and nonprofits wielding grant money. And schools have embraced social entrepreneurship as an area of study: Oxford’s Said Business School holds a social entrepreneurship conference each year. Harvard Business School’s social enterprise club is one of its largest extracurricular groups.
“In the past three to five years, it’s gone viral,” Mr. Grossman says of social entrepreneurship. “You name the business school, the students are focused on it.”
For Mr. Aramburu, the social entrepreneurship seed was planted by his parents, a doctor and a nurse working with low-income patients in San Antonio. They instilled in him the importance of giving back to society, he says.
After graduating from Princeton in 2007 with a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, Mr. Aramburu studied soil science at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and then worked at a Manhattan-based tech start-up. Through those experiences, he came up with the idea of making and selling a charcoal-based alternative to fertilizer, called biochar, in 2008. To develop this product, Mr. Aramburu received funding from nonprofits, including Ashoka and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Mr. Aramburu favored starting a for-profit business over a nonprofit organization because, as he puts it, “I believe in the notion of doing good and doing well at the same From a practical standpoint, he felt he could raise capital more quickly to build the venture faster. “Funding cycles in the nonprofit world are slow,” he says. He also wanted to use a hiring strategy popular among cash-short start-ups that isn’t an option for nonprofits – attracting top job candidates by offering them equity.
Over the next four years, Mr. Aramburu fine-tuned his biochar and began selling it to gardeners in the United States. He also developed relationships with 5,000 small farmers in Kenya, eventually selling the biochar to them at a much-reduced price.
The idea for Edyn sprang from this work and was further cemented when Mr. Aramburu read a United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs report showing that the earth’s population will hit 9.6 billion by 2050. Mr. Aramburu wondered how he could “use technology and the Internet to help farmers and other people grow more food.”
He had also noticed that generations of entrepreneurs before him were more focused on making money than on solving global problems. But among younger entrepreneurs, that tension appears to be lessening. “I don’t think we can continue the business as usual of just trying to maximize profits,” he says.
After using some of his own profits from his biochar venture to start Edyn, Mr. Aramburu sought out Silicon Valley investors and was able to raise $1.6 million. One investor, Yves Behar, the co-founder of the industrial design firm Fuseproject, also signed on to design Edyn’s soil sensor, valve and smartphone app.
Last week, Edyn started a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising an additional $100,000 to finance the first production run of sensors and valves. Campaign backers will receive Edyn sensors and water valves in the spring, which is when Home Depot will also begin selling them. The retail price has not yet been set.
According to Mr. Aramburu’s calculations, as demand for the sensors and valves increases in the United States and the company begins producing them in larger batches, manufacturing costs will drop, making it financially feasible for him to sell the devices at a minimal cost to growers in the developing world, as he did with the biochar. In countries where farmers don’t have Internet access, the sensors will use cell networks. Each one can analyze the soil in a 250-square-foot plot of land.
Mr. Aramburu also hopes to make an impact closer to home. He says the devices can significantly reduce water use – a potential boon for drought-plagued parts of the United States. And Edyn’s customers and Kickstarter backers have the option of donating the sensors and valves to a nonprofit that builds gardens in schools.
But profits are very much on Mr. Aramburu’s mind as well. Even though social entrepreneurs by and large haven’t reached the same level of financial success as say, tech entrepreneurs, he’s brimming with optimism.
(“There haven’t been huge, billion-dollar exits yet,” Mr. Aramburu notes. “We aim to have the first one.”)
