About Cropsy

Ali is a computer systems engineer and started Cropsy with co-founder Leila in 2019. He built the first prototypes and developed the technology with Leila to where it is today straight out of engineering school. Ali is the technology lead and sales lead, and he spent the last 5 years immersed in vineyards and viticultural practices with growers from Blenheim to Bordeaux.

Leila is a computer systems engineer by training, and started Cropsy with co-founder Ali in 2019. She built the first prototypes and developed the technology with Ali to where it is today straight out of engineering school. Leila coordinates our multidisciplinary team to deliver the full value of Cropsy to growers. She also manages capital raising and investor relationships.

Winston is a mathematician and computer scientist, and he leads the AI that turns millions of vine images into numbers a grower can act on. He grew up in Wainuiomata and moved to Auckland to study maths and computer science, then worked in maths research at Plant & Food Research before joining Cropsy in 2021. He owns our detection models and the corrections behind them, which are what make a vine count trustworthy rather than merely fast.

Rory is an engineer whose background runs from Lego robotics to quadcopter aerodynamics. He and Ali were building robots together in high school, and he went on to a master’s degree in the aerodynamic modelling and wind-disturbance rejection of rotary drones. He learned to fly at sixteen at the Walsh Memorial Scout Flying School, and spent his university years on the aerodynamics of a formula-style race car his team rebuilt from scratch every season. Rory joined Cropsy in 2020 and leads our technology and customer success, which is why he is usually the one out in the rows with a scanner on the front of a vehicle.

Rex is a third-generation New Zealand winegrower and a viticulture consultant. Over the last 25 years he has established his own wine brand, grapevine nursery and viticulture consulting business, and has become the face behind New Zealand Winegrowers’ Vineyard Spray Schedule.

He has been a board member for New Zealand Winegrowers, a member of the New Zealand Winegrowers research committee and an executive committee member for Organic Winegrowers New Zealand.

Sean spent six and a half years at Sony Depthsensing Solutions in Brussels before coming home to New Zealand, working across calibration, algorithm design and proof-of-concept development on time-of-flight and multi-camera systems. He studied electronics engineering at Waikato, where both his bachelor’s and master’s projects were on 3D cameras, and did his placements in agriculture. At Cropsy he builds the on-board half of the scanner: the part that has to see a vine sharply at 8,000 vines an hour, in any weather, with nobody watching it.

Charlie came to vineyard data by way of carbon accounting and marine conservation. He grew up in rural Northern Ireland, studied mechanical engineering, then took a master’s in sustainable food production and joined the agriculture team at the Carbon Trust in London doing product carbon footprinting. A second master’s in data science followed, with a final project training object detection on images of stranded dolphins for a marine charity. He moved to New Zealand in 2022 and joined Cropsy in 2024, and now works on the models behind our disease and yield outputs.

Seb builds the backend and the data-quality checks that stand between a raw scan and a number a grower will plan a season around. He came to engineering after a first career spanning education and technical writing, condensing a computer science degree into a graduate diploma and substituting two undergraduate papers for master’s ones in software architecture and embedded systems. Outside work he has a self-published novel, a music EP and a feature screenplay to his name.