Anna Rath
Anna Rath President & Chief Executive Officer, Vestaron
Anna joined Vestaron as President and CEO and as a board member in April 2018, bringing more than a decade of experience across multiple venture-backed ag-tech companies. Before that, Anna founded and led as CEO the company NexSteppe to develop and commercialize optimized crops for the biobased economy. Previously, Anna led Commercial and Business Development at Ceres, an agricultural biotechnology company and developer of dedicated energy crops. Anna started her professional career at McKinsey & Co., holds a master’s degree in genetics from the University of Michigan, received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and attended leadership programs at Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management. She currently sits on the board of directors for the Biotech Industry Organization and was the 2016 recipient of the Rosalind Franklin award for female leadership in industrial biotechnology.
Joshua Hofheimer
Joshua Hofheimer Partner, Sidley Austin LLP
JOSH HOFHEIMER combines almost two decades of corporate, commercial and technology law practice with the experience having run a public biotech company to bring his clients focused, practical counsel to help them grow their business and maximize their value and returns. His practice focuses on representing clients in the agribusiness and food, life sciences, and information technology sectors. Josh’s work spans a broad array of technology, intellectual property and commercial transactions ranging from agricultural technology to medical devices, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, software, Internet and new media transactions and includes developing and implementing business strategies for commercialization of multiple intellectual property platforms.Notably, he represented Monsanto Company in its efforts to advance agriculture research and development leveraging gene-editing technology through a joint venture with Pairwise Plants. Josh also has negotiated research, funding and commercialization agreements, licenses and technology spin-outs, as well as developed strategies to exploit proprietary products growing out of the research programs of agri-tech and bio-tech clientele. He also advises clients on general corporate matters.Josh leads the firm’s Global Agribusiness and Food industry group, which has been acknowledged as the only Chambers-ranked Band 1 law firm in the category (2016–2022).

MEDIA CONTACTS:<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span>

<strong>Ben Cicora</strong>, SVP Sales &amp; Marketing • 970.443.9220 • <a href=”mailto:bcicora@vestaron.com”>bcicora@vestaron.com</a>
Steve Betz, VP Communications • 515.707.6096 • sbetz@vestaron.com