Food is crucial to health. That much is obvious. As investor Naeem Lakhani puts it: “If people ask where the evidence is, I just say, let’s book a doctor’s appointment in a year. You don’t eat. I will. And let’s see who shows up.”
But Lakhani is going one step further than that. As the founder of The First Thirty, an agtech venture capital fund, Lakhani is putting big money behind the idea that food is not simply key to sustaining life, but that many of our modern health struggles are a direct consequence of depleted food grown in a diminished environment. In other words, if you want to fix human health, fix the soils.
It is a contentious outlook – and for good reason. While research has at times found links between soil health and human health, it is sparse and by no means conclusive. No researcher on the planet can say exactly how a change in soil biology might affect the nutritional quality of our food.
The €100m ‘agrihealth’ strategy
Yet that’s exactly what Lakhani wants to change. With general partner Antony Yousefian, The First Thirty is currently raising capital to deploy into a €100m “agrihealth” strategy backing companies that can help build the infrastructure to connect soil health, food quality, and human health through data, biology, and technology.
If the dots can be connected, the opportunity is vast. A study published in The Lancet in 2019 found poor diet is a factor in around one in five global deaths, yet it remains conspicuously disconnected from the $10 trillion estimated by the World Health Organization to go on healthcare each year.
“That’s a misallocation of our healthcare spend,” says Lakhani, arguing funding could be better spent on improving the food system in a way that would deliver better health outcomes at lower costs.
The First Thirty – named because “we owe everything to the first thirty centimetres of soil” – traces its roots back to 2019, when Lakhani built a food-focused accelerator program with the Katapult Accelerator.
While this was quickly forced to close amid the travel restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lakhani took his backers and launched Future Foodways, refining the thesis in a bid to validate venture as an opportunity to transform agriculture.
The platform was rebranded in 2022 as The First Thirty, reflecting an even sharper focus and a broader ambition. Around that time, Yousefian came on board to help build the investment strategy.
Why now? AI and genomics change the game
Until recently, trying to prove soil biology was linked to human health was, by and large, prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Yet as Yousefian explains, the collapse of genomics costs in the last five years, alongside advancements in AI, means computers can now quickly churn through systemic complexities it previously took teams of experts years to contemplate.
“You can now understand biology really cheaply,” he says. “We just need to figure out how best to act on it all.”
Farmers as healthcare providers?
As with any agtech fund, if The First Thirty is to succeed, then its companies must ultimately prove themselves attractive to farmers. So why would a farmer be interested in “turning agriculture into healthcare,” as the venture capitalists put it? The answer, says Yousefian, is that “it’s how farmers will start to differentiate their products.”
He points to Edacious, a start-up backed by The First Thirty as part of an $8.1m raise in February, which measures the nutrient content inside food. The company provides its technology as a service to food producers and brands, thereby allowing them to market their goods as higher-quality compared to the competition.
Such a ploy, of course, only works if there is a market for higher-nutrition products. Yet while devotees of organic have long been prepared to pay a premium in the belief of better quality, they remain a small fragment of the total population.
The economics of health vs. food
For Lakhani, this comes back to the disconnect between healthcare and diet. In healthcare economics, he explains, a metric is used called Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) to price the value of any health intervention. For the UK government, for example, the benchmark is around £20k for a year of perfect health, meaning if a treatment costs more than this for an individual, then no matter its efficacy, it’s unlikely to be commissioned.
This rules out a lot of effective medical treatments, but it is still just a fraction of what people and governments are willing to invest in food. “It tells you there’s a disconnect between people’s understanding that you can get a better life out of food,” Lakhani says. “They are willing to pay a lot of money for a better year of life, but they don’t understand that they can generate that for a much cheaper cost.”
AI-powered shopping and consumer behavior
The landscape for shoppers will also be shifted by advancements in AI, he predicts, meaning people will no longer have to stand around reading nutrition labels to figure out which product is best for their health.
“Very few people spend their time in the aisles reading labels. But soon I won’t have to do that anymore. All I have to do is ask Gemini to do my shopping.”
The data challenge: Translating science into value
The key will be what information they’re given. For even if a definitive link is found between soil health and human health, how that is then translated to the consumer will be crucial to its impact on sales.
“The data being captured has to translate into value you can move through the supply chain,” Lakhani says. “Because if we can’t talk about that, then it will never affect what’s happening at the other end.”
