Irakli Chikava is co-founder and CEO of Telagri, a Georgian agri-fintech and agricultural data company whose work he sums up as helping banks lend smarter and farmers grow better. Founded in Tbilisi in 2022, Telagri uses satellite imagery, climate data, and proprietary agronomic algorithms to de-risk agricultural lending in emerging markets, providing banks and financial institutions with farm-level risk analysis, underwriting support, and real-time portfolio monitoring. The company is actively expanding across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, attracting substantial engagement from governments, insurers, traders, and international financial institutions. He brings more than fifteen years of leadership in agriculture and agribusiness advisory, having directed over $40 million in investment projects and supported agricultural producers across emerging markets. Prior to Telagri, he and co-founder Valeri Amiranashvili managed an agricultural consultancy and asset management firm overseeing a $35 million portfolio spanning more than 70,000 hectares — operations that regularly required flying in agronomists from Spain, Italy, and the United States, underscoring the critical deficit of specialized local expertise. Addressing that structural deficit became the company's founding thesis. Telagri launched by connecting farmers in emerging economies with accredited international agronomists for virtual consultations — a model Chikava terms "telemedicine for agriculture" — linking more than 1,500 producers across Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania with over 500 vetted specialists in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the United States, and Israel, operating under a rigorous ~8% consultant acceptance rate. The resulting diagnostic data, anonymized and aggregated while preserving farmer data ownership, served as the empirical foundation for the credit-risk and portfolio underwriting platform the company operates today. In October 2025, Telagri secured a strategic investment from New York-based AI and data science consultancy Dressler Consulting to accelerate the platform's predictive analytics engine and fuel expansion across the Caucasus and Central Asia. A Web Summit alumnus, Chikava describes himself as an agritech executive driven by sustainable agricultural transformation; he is also the founder of Agronnect.