Overview
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.
Career history
In the news
- In 2024, my co-authors at Oxford/ETH Zurich and I wrote about how large language models could change agriculture. We argued that they could become digital agronomists, extend advisory services, speed up agricultural R&D and eventually become an interface to farm machinery. We also warned that bad advice and poor data governance could create real risks. What we have seen in 2026: -- LLM-assisted digital agronomy is picking up steam. India launched Bharat-VISTAAR in February 2026, giving farmers access to agricultural, weather and
- After a recent talk I gave in Brussels on China, a few people asked me for recommendations on what to read or follow to better understand China today. So I’ll share this as a short series on China-related books, podcasts, lectures and other resources worth checking out in 2026. Part 1 below. Business and economics 1. Apple in China, by Patrick McGee A cautionary tale of how Apple became deeply dependent on China, and, in the process, helped build the industrial ecosystem that now makes China so hard to compete with. 2. The Next
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