 Greetings from the USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for letting me participate in your program. And I'm excited to share with you a few things about how venture funds think about food safety and sort of some of the technology landscape and issues that we see here at our fund here in Mountain Group. So for this, I really have three objectives. One, I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a high level of how venture funding works because I think that may be interesting as you think about how technology gets developed kind of generally. And then I'm gonna give you some venture perspectives on food safety itself. And then finally, I've got a few technology examples that are specific companies that we've invested in in the past that have some connection to food safety. So I thought they would be kind of really good examples of how these things sort of work. So first, let's start with venture funding. The term venture funding sort of gets thrown around a little bit in different ways. I think when people think about venture funding, they kind of think about the big tech companies like Facebook or Google. And indeed they were venture funded endeavors from the beginning, but venture funding also has a nice bit of application as it relates to biotech. And so what venture funding is really is it's a funding mechanism whereby companies can be invested in that are really high risk. And it's really a situation where they probably wouldn't get funded by any other mechanism, but these funds exist because they take those risky investments and kind of spread them across a portfolio of companies. And on the whole, then they can return a nice return back to their specific investors. So the way it would work is that an entrepreneur would have a technology that they, or an idea or maybe some, they work at a university or a lab somewhere and they have an idea for technology. And they would use that to be able to start up a company and the venture capital firm then would come alongside that company and put in money and buy shares in that company that, and then they would help manage the company to get that technology developed. So very often the outcome of that startup company would be some sort of product. And then in the end of that process, that technology goes on the marketplace. It has an impact and there's some sort of exit that allows the venture company, the venture firm to be repaid for their investment in the process. And what comes from that then is that technology gets developed and either sold to a bigger company that might wanna take it further or you might even cause the company to go public. But this is a way kind of very broadly that technology can get developed and be then useful. At, I work at a company called Mountain Group Partners which is a venture fund that's in Nashville, Tennessee. And we have our focus on biotechnology as it relates to human and animal health. We have life sciences sectors where we work on diagnostics and medical technology. And then we do some opportunistic drug development. Animal health is kind of a broad field that applies to kind of cross technology. And then we do do some health tech. What's most relevant for this conference is food safety as an area fits under animal health and has been kind of deployed in several different technologies that we've invested with more broadly. So if you think about then food safety from the concept of kind of the venture lens, I think there are several different areas that are noteworthy. One of them are some of the drivers for change. So really the need to overcome food safety is driven by mainly two factors. One would be regulatory implications. So HACCP programs and other things are mandated by the government. And so if you're a producer of animal protein, you have to pay attention to what are those regulations that the government might apply to those and be able to then take advantage of those. So that's one of the drivers. Another big driver though, and probably oftentimes a bigger driver is the consumer pressure. As companies become well known in the food producing area and have established brands, HACCP as an example that in poultry production, their brand becomes so important that they don't wanna risk having an outbreak in food safety that would tarnish their brand. So that becomes another key driver for change as it relates to food safety becoming important. When we look at solutions then for food safety, we really look at it through the lens of a customer. So they're gonna say things like, is it economically viable to use this technology? If it's more expensive to use the technology, then they can get a return on, then that'll be a barrier to them using it. Second factor is, does it fit in the workflow of what they're trying to do as an operation? If that technology is one that doesn't fit in their workflow, then very likely it'll be a slow or difficult to adapt or adopt into their practices. So that's another factor. Then is it safe and effective? Does it really work to do what they say it is and is it safe for the animal and for the workers and for people? And so if there are food safety solutions that themselves are very toxic and so those would be undesirable because it relates to trying to be effective solutions needed for food safety. Then finally animal welfare. I think we obviously have to take into account what is the animal's welfare and will this solution be beneficial to the animal or not? I often think about as it relates to food safety, healthy animals produce safe food. And so if you are doing things to make the animal healthier very often that will translate into a safer food product. Then the technology solutions that are applicable fit into several different categories. One of them is biosecurity. So you can see disinfectants that may be used or sanitary practices, but they may also be sophisticated things like a phage that could be used to create the appropriate biosecurity. Diagnostics is an important area. And those diagnostics could be detecting the pathogen in one form or another and that's probably the most basic sort of technology that exists for food and safety. But there's also technologies that might be applied to just understanding the animal's immune system that may be helpful for food safety. I think vaccines is a very important tool for being able to ensure that the animal can be as effective as possible at dealing with the pathogens that might be there or the basically the bacteria type of organisms that could be there that can relate to food safety. Nutritional supplements is another area. I think there's a lot of promise as it relates to the microbiome and how that may be used to either enhance the immune system of animals and or maybe compete against human pathogens that may get shed by animals. And then finally, in its most broadest sense even things like alternative proteins where people are thinking of different ways to make substitutes for animal-sourced foods could be alternatives as well that could improve food safety. So for my final bit of time, I'd like to then just give you three examples of companies that we've invested in that have a connection to food safety. So the first company is Advanced Animal Diagnostics. And what Advanced Animal Diagnostics is really all about is a diagnostic test that's used to responsibly use antibiotics and monitor the health of animals. And in particular, I'm showing here a test where they pull a blood sample from the animal, put it on a slide and put it in a reader and within 32 seconds, they can get sort of a blood, a white cell blood profile. That's indicative of whether that animal is gonna break with disease and then that you can take interventions like antibiotics or other therapies, therapeutics that can help the animals that are gonna break with disease. And the flip side is you don't have to mass medicate animals with this approach because you can effectively find those animals that are most likely to get sick and not the other ones. So the way that this works specifically is as it takes a white blood cell differential in particular, it's looking for a lymphocyte neutrophil ratio and how that might relate to then the ability of that animal to get sick or have a viral infection or bacterial infection. So that's certainly a company that has some interesting technology as it relates to animal wellness and how that might relate to food safety. Second company that I wanted to highlight is a company called Applied Life Sciences and Systems. And what this company is looking at is, is there a way to individually vaccinate chicks rather than mass medication? So mass medication like spray cabinets has been used kind of as the industry standard for a long time, but for certain types of vaccines, they're very ineffective, probably 30 to 90% ineffective. And the reason for that is because you're spraying this sort of mass spray on and you're not very effectively vaccinating individual animals, you're relying on preening or other things for them to get vaccinated. Also it wastes the vaccine. And by spraying them, you also chill the animals so you make them susceptible to other diseases. So what Applied Life Sciences and Systems has done is they've gone and created a sophisticated approach where they can use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software along with robotics and microfluidics to individually vaccinate chicks as they progress through a conveyor system and they can go from say 30% vaccination up to 99% vaccination. And this has applications across a whole series of live vaccines, some of which could relate to food safety. Final company that I'll just highlight that we've invested in is one called Resilient Biotics. And what they have is really advanced products directed towards the microbiome. So they look to take organisms from the environment, do deep sequencing, machine learning, find therapeutically focused or enhanced organisms that have unique properties and then they test them in animals and they continue to refine this. And so they have a suite of microbiome products that are associated across a wide range of different applications. And this is just one of many companies that are looking at the microbiome as a very promising area. So to conclude, I just wanna thank you for your time. I hope I illustrated how venture investing works and how it might lead to the use of this to help for creating technologies that fit with food safety. Thank you.