Djavan Clercq

Djavan Clercq is the founder of Agri-Ninja, based in Brussels. Since April 2025 he has also been founder and owner of CubeRoots and a partner at Noven Partners. He has been a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford since October 2021, working towards a doctorate in social data science on AI and mathematical optimisation for climate-resilient agriculture, due for completion in 2026.

From October 2019 to April 2025 he was director of data science at McKinsey & Company, where he had previously held internships in 2015 and 2016. Earlier he worked as a data scientist at JD.COM and as a data engineer at Alibaba Group, and was a graduate student instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2016 and 2019 he was co-founder and CTO of Bio-Tesseract, and he has also worked as a VC analyst at Tsing Capital, a consultant to the CEO of Hainan BioCNG on engineering operations, and in short roles at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Kearney and Lenovo.

He holds a master's in industrial engineering and operations research from Berkeley, a PhD and an MSc in environmental science and engineering from Tsinghua University, and a BA in economics from Sciences Po. He studied economics and intensive Chinese at Renmin University of China and undertook mathematics coursework with The Open University. At Tsinghua he co-founded White Horse Theatre (China) and served as president of RISE Tsinghua.