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July 2016 Spotlighted Entrepreneur – Erico Mattos

Erico Mattos, a University of Georgia alumnus and co-founder of the horticultural and precision agriculture company PhytoSynthetix, was selected to attend the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The three-day meeting began June 22 with a morning address by President Barack Obama, who announced the first summit in 2010.

Erico Mattos, a University of Georgia alumnus and co-founder of the horticultural and precision agriculture company PhytoSynthetix, was selected to attend the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The three-day meeting began June 22 with a morning address by President Barack Obama, who announced the first summit in 2010.

PhytoSynthetix, which is currently housed in UGA’s Innovation Gateway startup incubator, grew out of Mattos’s research on using LED lights to grow crops indoors that was conducted while he was a graduate student in UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. His company now develops and sells high-performance lighting systems, which allow growers to more precisely control plant biomass production, flowering and product quality. The lighting technology developed by PhytoSynthetix monitors a plant’s light use, and computer software adjusts light output to match plant requirements, allowing growers to achieve high-production yields without using excess energy. Mattos hopes this technology will serve as the foundation of controlled-environment farming, in which food crops are grown indoors and humidity, temperature and light exposure are all optimized to fit the plant’s needs. Read More