Barbara Connolly Keady

Barbara Connolly Keady is Director of Marketing and a member of the Management Committee at Ceres Partners, a specialist investment manager focused exclusively on food and agriculture. She joined the firm in 2010 and is responsible for overseeing all of its new business development efforts, spanning both the firm's farmland strategy and its food & agriculture private equity vehicle. She brings more than 15 years of finance and asset-management experience to the role.

Before Ceres, Keady built a career across institutional finance. She worked as a convertible-bond research analyst at Southport Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund; as an associate in the Private Wealth Management group at Morgan Stanley; and earlier in the fixed-income sales department at Bankers Trust Company. She holds FINRA Series 7, 63, and 24 securities licenses.

On the education side, Keady earned a B.S. in finance from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School (Columbia University). She is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States.

Beyond Ceres, Keady was appointed an Independent Director on the board of Sprott Inc. (NYSE/TSX: SII) in 2021, reflecting her standing in the alternative-asset and real-asset investment community. In October 2025, Ceres Partners was acquired by WisdomTree, Inc., marking WisdomTree's entry into private/real-asset markets anchored by Ceres' farmland platform.

• Food & agriculture only: Ceres Partners describes itself as "a specialist investment manager focused exclusively on food and agriculture," combining real-asset ownership (U.S. farmland) with operating-company investing.
• Dual strategy: (1) Ceres Farms, LLC — a co-mingled fund (est. 2007) that acquires and manages productive U.S. agricultural land; (2) the Ceres Food & Agriculture Opportunity Fund (FAO) — a private equity vehicle providing growth equity to emerging food & ag operating companies.
• Growth equity, not classic seed/angel: The FAO fund backs companies with demonstrated technology or operations rather than pre-product seed bets; one deal (iUNU) was reportedly driven in part by the target's "huge patent portfolio."
• What makes them say yes: Differentiated technology and defensible IP, mission/values alignment, and exposure to durable agricultural/real-asset economics — farmland is positioned as a large but underpenetrated real-asset class with "equity-like returns with low volatility."
• Keady's role: As Director of Marketing and head of new business development, she is a primary point of contact for capital formation and investor/partner relationships rather than the deal lead on individual portfolio investments.