United Kingdom
May 10, 2024
James Seaman takes on the role of Director of Engineering, and Nathanael Dannenberg joins as Sales Manager. Their recruitment is a strategic move as Zayndu prepares for the rapid expansion of its cold plasma seed treatment and priming process into the global controlled environment agriculture sector.
Zayndu has developed the world’s first cold plasma seed treatment system, ActivatedAir. The process treats and primes seeds, resulting in synchronised germination and enhanced plant growth. The firm sees huge potential for its solution and is growing its team to meet the market's demands.
The new Director of Engineering is James Seaman, who joins Zayndu from FireAngel Safety Technology. James’s initial focus will be establishing global best practices in Zayndu’s manufacturing facility, ensuring the company can meet the demand for ActivatedAir systems.
“Sales interest is running at an unprecedented high worldwide,” says James. “Scaling manufacturing faster than customer demand is a huge focus for us. I aim to get ahead of customer orders and build stock of the systems so we don’t hold back growers from accessing our revolutionary technology.”
James also leads the development of next-generation initiatives, such as SeedCloud, Zayndu’s cloud-based platform that remotely monitors the performance of every system globally. SeedCloud recently won Zayndu a gold award for digital technology innovation at the Made in the Midlands awards.
“With SeedCloud, every Zayndu machine worldwide is connected to our monitoring service. The system monitors every single treatment our systems apply, continuously reporting back over 160 parameters from each machine.
“This enables us to monitor the health of the plasma and mechanical systems, diagnose any issues, and even identify training requirements for operators.”
Nathanael Dannenberg is well-known in the UK horticulture sector, having been the UK and Ireland Horticulture Commercial Leader for Philips Lighting. He has extensive experience introducing the latest growing technology to glasshouses and vertical farms.
Having come from retail lighting into horticulture, Nathanael has become passionate about the sector.
“There are all these challenges around energy prices, labour shortages, and disease, and yet growers are doing some amazing things,” says Nathanael. “It’s a great industry to be part of, and Zayndu’s technology represents some of the most exciting technology on offer to growers now.
“The UK's AgTech space is really strong. Considering how influential the Dutch have been historically, some of the more exciting technology is coming from the UK now.”
Nathanael’s initial focus will be on UK customers, but with growing interest in Zayndu’s technology in North America and the Gulf states, he expects to work with customers in these markets in the near future.
Ralph Weir, CEO of Zayndu, welcomed the new appointments.
“Zayndu is growing at such a rate that we have to hire the best people to support our ambitions and our customers' enthusiasm,” announces Ralph. “James and Nathanael's experience is invaluable; they are joining at a very exciting time.”
About Zayndu:
Zayndu’s seed treatment and priming process harnesses cold plasma to create ActivatedAir™, the world’s first application of this technology on seeds. It maximises profits for controlled-environment agriculture growers by increasing yields and speeding up growing cycles.
ActivatedAir™ eliminates seed-borne pathogens, stopping them from contaminating growing facilities and reducing seedling diseases like damping off. It also kick-starts the seed’s metabolic processes, effectively priming it for sowing.
The idea for Zayndu came from collaborative work by Dr Felipe Iza’s research group at Loughborough University and industrial partners - who identified a growing unmet need for sustainable seed treatments that delivered increased productivity and plant health.
To exploit this opportunity, Zayndu was formed in 2019, and Ralph Weir was brought in to head up the company as CEO. A proof of concept was tested and established, and now ActivatedAirTM is fully commercially available.
Presently, ActivatedAir™ is being used by some of the biggest and most sophisticated vertical farms in the world, as well as more traditional greenhouses. The most common crops are leafy greens and micro greens, but the team has experience with a wide range of crops beyond these.
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