Going straight from an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Warwick to a full-time job at Google sounds like the dream. But for Alex Shinebourne, it was clear that he wasn’t quite ready yet for the leap to industry.
“I was keen to work on some more research-heavy topics,” he explains.
In 2023 Alex found himself at Darwin, where he completed a one-year MRes in AI for the Study of Environmental Risk. The course forms the entry point to a three-year PhD, but for now continuing academia will have to wait, as instead the Master’s proved the launchpad to a company putting its combination of AI and sustainability into practice.
Tunen, the company which Alex has launched with a former colleague from Google, works with farmers to gather data which can then be used to build sustainable solutions.
“I did the first year of the 1+3 and absolutely loved it, but this other project started gaining traction,” he explains.
“What we do here is we try to take a pragmatic approach, enabling farmers to collect field data in a frictionless way. It involves a lot of talking to farmers and spending time looking at how they use technology, and trying to fit stuff into their existing working practices.”
The background of his business partner, Julius, who had grown up on a farm in Germany, was crucial to developing a viable approach.
“There’s this difficulty in the agricultural world where scientists and people like me who grew up in big cities, who think that they want to do stuff in agriculture, quickly realise that there are often practical considerations that we omit. Like the fact that when you’re on a tractor, you’re wearing gloves sometimes, and using a phone doesn’t make sense.”
His year at Cambridge, during which he also worked with NIAB (the National Institute of Agricultural Botany), equipped Alex with the skills and experience to make the leap into entrepreneurship. It also transformed the opportunities for investment.
“It taught me a lot about doing good research. It also taught me a bunch of skills around remote sensing and machine learning – I had more of a traditional software engineering background, so it really upskilled me in machine learning and AI skills. And I think also being at Darwin was just a great platform. In terms of the fundraising landscape it helped to have been at Cambridge, and also to have been doing research helps to give credibility to us.”
Tunen, though headquartered in the UK, is predominantly active in Germany, but Alex’s French/British background means they’re well placed to expand. But while getting the company off the ground is his current priority, Alex hasn’t ruled out an eventual return to academics.
“I really love research and I really love my research group at Cambridge, so I would love to come back when I have a bit more time to dedicate to pure research again. In the domain of agriculture, there’s a comparative lack of data for many applications of AI/ML still. It’s about the tools that farmers are using, from their tractors to their computer terminals, working together and collecting the right data. And ultimately I think there are lots of really interesting questions to answer in agriculture which I would love to get to at some point once the data exists.”
Alex will graduate on Saturday with an MRes in AI for the Study of Environmental Risk.
