About

The Team

Built by operators, for operators

With 25+ combined years of experience building enterprise IoT solutions and deploying smart sensors at scale, we're making that technology accessible to everyone.

Jake Simon

Co-founder & CEO

EducationUniversity of Southern California (Business & Entrepreneurship)

BackgroundFormer Deloitte Consulting - IoT practice, Smart Factory solutions

LeadsSales, partnerships, fundraising, customer success

NotableSpeaker: MURTEC, ReFED Food Waste Summit, AURI Podcast, The Perfect Bite

Contributing member, Restaurant Technology Network (RTN) data standards

Based inSouthern California / Minneapolis

Tushar Agrawal

Co-founder & CTO

EducationUniversity at Buffalo

BackgroundFormer Deloitte Digital, Hitachi Vantara, Hughes

LeadsProduct development, engineering, platform architecture

NotableExpertise in IoT, AI, cloud computing

Featured: AWS Industries blog, Restaurant Technology Network

Based inWashington, D.C.

Our team includes engineers from Deloitte, Siemens, Hitachi, Hughes, SAP, and other leading technology companies, with years of experience designing large-scale IoT hardware and software projects. We started ConnectedFresh as a passion project after seeing how much food becomes waste or unsafe due to temperature-related issues.

The Origin Story

How it started

The best ideas come from real problems. Ours started with a broken cooler and a warehouse full of wasted food.

The Beginning

Enterprise IoT at Deloitte

Jake Simon and Tushar Agrawal met at Deloitte Consulting, where they worked in the IoT practice designing and deploying industrial IoT solutions for Fortune 100 manufacturers. They were connecting directly to factory machines - PLCs, production lines - to enable predictive and preventive maintenance. The work was impactful, but expensive and complex.

The Moment

A cooler breaks down. Everything changes.

A close friend's father owned a produce warehouse and experienced a costly cooler malfunction. The problem wasn't the failing equipment - it was the lag in discovering the fault, which led to massive food waste and service disruptions. Jake and Tushar realized the same operational intelligence they were building for Fortune 100 factories could be brought to food service using simpler, off-the-shelf sensors.

The Insight

The sensors aren't smart. The platform is.

As Jake puts it: "We are not a hardware company. The sensors aren't smart - they're just dumb sensors. It's what you actually do with the data that gives you the insight." They saw that the food service industry was drowning in manual processes - clipboards, paper logs, reactive firefighting - while the technology to automate all of it already existed.

2019

ConnectedFresh is born

They helped that first produce warehouse shift from reactive to proactive operations. That same year, ConnectedFresh won First Prize at the 2019 Momenta LoRaWAN Startup Challenge in Berlin - validating that this idea had legs far beyond a single warehouse.

2023

Techstars Future of Food Powered by Ecolab

Selected for the Techstars Future of Food Accelerator with Ecolab - one of just 12 companies chosen. This partnership deepened ConnectedFresh's ties to the food safety ecosystem and accelerated growth across major restaurant chains.

Today

Thousands of sensors providing millions of data points

Trusted by leading restaurant chains and food service operators. An integration-first platform that plays nice with the tools operators already use. A team of ex-Deloitte, Siemens, SAP engineers who believe food safety shouldn't depend on someone remembering to check a clipboard.

From factory floors to restaurant kitchens.