About

We are committed to engineering high-quality products that bring positive change to the world.

WHO ARE WE?

Agsol is an award winning social business incorporated in 2016 by long-term collaborators and friends, Matt Carr and Greg Denn. Combined, they have spent more than 40 years working in the agricultural and renewable energy sectors across three continents.

Matt Carr: CEO & Co-founder
Matt is a renewable energy technical and market access specialist. He has worked at the forefront of energy access throughout the Pacific, Asia and Africa with solar start-ups, international power companies, multi-lateral donors and NGOs. Matt is based in Kenya.

Greg Denn: CTO & Co-founder
Greg is a deeply practical and seasoned mechanical engineer. He’s been manufacturing and supplying agricultural machines and renewable energy technologies throughout the Pacific for nearly two decades. Greg is based in China and is responsible for Agsol’s product development and manufacturing.

Julie Orr: COO/CFO
Julie brings over ten years’ experience in finance and business operations. She is a Chartered Accountant and started her career in management consulting. After 5 years rising through the ranks of Deloitte, Julie moved to East Africa and has spent the past 8 years working with NGOs, social enterprises and SMEs to improve their management, financial control and growth strategies.

Graham Benton: Operations Manager – Africa
Graham has been working in East Africa for the past 7 years to bring innovations to improve the lives of millions of smallholder farmers. Having built and run two companies in Kenya, he has worked closely with farmers and rural stakeholders to develop a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities surrounding them.

Vina Zhong: Operations Manager – China
Vina has over 14 years’ experience in purchasing, logistics and marketing. She is Agsol’s all-round fixer when it comes to the smooth operation of our China base. Having started her career in a remote and poor village, Vina’s professional development is a testament to her motivation and aptitude, teaching herself business skills, English and Japanese along the way.

Together the team brings a global mindset to Agsol, from a downstream perspective of who our customers are, their needs, and how to do business in developing countries, to an upstream perspective of how to design life-changing products and do business in China, where Agsol’s manufacturing base is located.

HISTORY

Agsol developed out of an established Papua New Guinean (PNG) company called Project Support Services (PSS) – www.psspng.com. PSS was formed in 2001 and has been manufacturing and supplying agricultural machinery and solar technologies to the PNG and Pacific markets since. Agsol was formed to build on PSS’s early successes with “solarising” small agro-processing machines and to take these technologies to a global market.

Our 1^st generation machines were released in 2015. After more than 750 sales and lots of feedback and iterations, we’ve built on this knowledge to design the best machines of their kind in the world.

Agsol’s 1^st generation machine range comprises: hammer mill (for flour production), maize sheller, rice huller, rice polisher, cassava grater, coconut scraper and food mincer/pelletiser. You can see them in action in the video below.

PARTNERS

We partner with in-country solar companies, agricultural machinery suppliers, micro-utility providers, project developers and investors to deploy our unique machines in rural markets. Our approach enables delivery of productive machines and the renewable energy systems that power them, to communities far beyond the reach of the grid.