Chinmay Soman is the co-founder, CEO, and inventor of core technologies at EarthSense, Inc. EarthSense is creating cutting edge robotics and machine learning solutions that are attracting strong interest from agricultural product developers, crop scientists, crop scouts, and growers. Chinmay co-founded EarthSense while he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a postdoctoral fellow, Chinmay created new ways to understand plant and soil microbiomes, studied the effects of agricultural management practices on the soil microbiomes, and invented new ways of optimizing plant microbiomes for improving agricultural productivity and sustainability. He was previously also the Lead Engineer and co-inventor of key technologies at Soil Diagnostics, Inc. Both Soil Diagnostics and EarthSense have won the Edwin Moore Family Agricultural Innovation Award. Chinmay believes that there are tremendous opportunities for both biological and technological innovation to improve agricultural productivity, sustainability, and profitability.