Forbes Under 30

Forbes named Lucas Frye and Joey Varikooty, co-founders Amber Agriculture, to the annual 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing and Industry category. Amber Agriculture, an Illinois Ventures portfolio company, helps farmers monitor and manage their crops using wireless, kernel-like sensors that follow crops through the supply chain journey. These sensors monitor temperature and moisture, protecting crops from spoilage.

Both Frye and Varikooty attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Frye earned a bachelor’s and MBA, while Varikooty left the university after receiving a 2018 Thiel Fellowship.

Growing up on a sixth-generation grain farm in Mason County Illinois, Frye majored in Ag Economics and continued into MBA studies at the University of Illinois. While in undergrad, Lucas was elected by the student body to represent the campus of 40,000 on the Board of Trustees. Experiences across the agriculture value chain (seed production, financial analyst work within ag lending, agribusiness strategy consulting) led Frye into early stage enterprise development.

‍Varikooty grew up in New Jersey. In high school he spent his summers and weekends commuting to New York City to work as an Instrumentation Engineer at a neurobiology lab at Rockefeller University. There he was involved in design and manufacturing efforts of experimental test devices in order to help world leading scientists better understand memory development in fruit flies. For college he moved to the Midwest to attend the University of Illinois where he double majored in Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering.

For the full Forbes profile, click here.