Dr Sumanta Talukdar

Dr Sumanta Talukdar is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur of South Asian heritage with decades of experience spanning optics, photonics, sensors, and computer science. His career has taken him through leadership and technical roles at some of the world's most respected technology organisations, including BAE Systems, Sharp, Honeywell Analytics, and Oxsensis — building a reputation as an engineer who thrives at the intersection of advanced hardware and real-world commercial application.

That track record culminated in the co-founding of WaveOptics, a UK-based augmented reality waveguide company that Snap Inc. acquired for over $500 million — one of the most significant deep-tech exits in UK history. The experience of taking a complex photonics technology from laboratory to global-scale commercial deployment gave Sumanta both the confidence and the methodology to repeat the process in a very different industry.

Sumanta founded Gardin in Oxford in 2019, inspired by the seemingly simple question of why growers had access to sophisticated environmental sensors for everything surrounding their crops, yet no direct way to measure the plants themselves. Drawing on his background in optical remote sensing, he developed a patented chlorophyll fluorescence sensor that measures photosynthetic activity in real time — giving greenhouse growers, for the first time, a genuine pulse on their crop health before problems become visible.

Under his leadership, Gardin has been featured by Wired as one of Oxford's hottest startups, received backing from top agritech investors including Navus Ventures, LDV Capital, MMC Ventures, and Seedcamp, and expanded its commercial footprint across greenhouses in Europe, North America, and beyond. In 2025, the company closed a $4.5 million Seed 2 round. Sumanta's work has been recognised in BBC Click and across the specialist agritech media as a major step towards truly data-driven, climate-resilient food production.