Mike Briers, an angel investor in agricultural IoT company, The Yield, and CEO of would-be agricultural co-operative research centre, Food Agility, has been made an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia in the 2016 Queens Birthday Honours “For distinguished service to the finance and digital technology sectors, particularly in the area of data intensive research and analysis, to higher education, and to Judo.”
He is also a the CEO and co-founder of the Knowledge Economy Institute (KEi), billed as ”the nation’s IoT research and innovation hub,” a council member of the IoT Alliance Australia. He was president of Judo New South Wales, from 2011 to 2012 and of the Judo Federation of Australia from 2012 to 2014. He was a director of RoZetta Technology from 2012 – 2015
According to his LinkedIn profile he has been named in the Knowledge Nation 100 as Australia’s chief evangelist for big data and IoT and is one of Australia’s most respected big data and IoT thought leaders and public-private sector entrepreneurs.
He led the growth of Sirca to become a leading provider of financial market data services to over 600 universities, corporations and regulatory clients worldwide and was a founder of Sirca subsidiary RoZetta Technology. Sirca was founded to ingest, analyse and provide services based on data from financial exchanges worldwide.
Food Agility works with partners to identify agribusiness opportunities, which it uses digital technology to solve. According to its web site it aims to “tackle real food industry problems working with innovative digital technology and talented people to make a difference.” It is currently seeing partners to support its application for a multimillion dollar CRC funding.
