Chafik Barbar is the CEO of Marble Technologies, a Lincoln, Nebraska-based company developing intelligent automation solutions for the meat processing industry, starting with beef and pork pack-off lines. He is a serial entrepreneur and agtech innovator with roots in Nebraska farming and ranching, bringing over two decades of software and startup experience to the food supply chain.

Barbar earned a BS in Economics from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management (2019-2020), where he first conceived the idea for Marble Technologies. He previously co-founded GrainBridge, a Nebraska-based agricultural financial risk management software company, serving as VP of Technology for over 10 years before it was acquired by Cargill and ADM.

Barbar launched Marble at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying chronic labor shortages in meatpacking as a critical, unsolved problem in the food supply chain. His problem-first philosophy is a defining principle: identifying real industry pain points before building any technology.

Marble Technologies raised $30 million in a Series A round, primarily from Nebraska investors, and is now a profitable company selling automated pack-off lines used in meatpacking plants across Omaha, central California, and Kansas. Barbar also previously founded Live Innovations, Inc. and held a software developer role at Fiserv.

Marble's automated pack-off systems now sort 3% of all U.S. beef production every day, and the company was awarded the Cornerstone Business of the Year by the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce. Marble's physical AI platform reduces pack-off labor from 20-30 workers down to as few as four, while also improving food safety and yield optimization.