Thayer Alum Brent Frei Inducted into Dartmouth's Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame

Brent Frei '88 Th'89, CEO and founder of TerraClear.

The Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame spotlights alumni whose ventures have reshaped industries and inspired future leaders. Honorees bring a combined legacy of visionary leadership, industry disruption, and global impact, embodying the values Dartmouth champions through the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship and Dartmouth's growing network of alumni innovators.

"Each of these inductees represents a bold idea brought to life," said Jamie Coughlin, founding executive director of the Magnuson Center. "They demonstrate the extraordinary ways Dartmouth alumni continue to shape the world—driving innovation in finance and technology while sharing their knowledge to inspire the next generation of builders, founders, and problem-solvers."

Also a co-founder of Smartsheet, Frei, who majored in engineering sciences with a concentration in mechanical engineering, played defensive tackle for the Big Green and learned much about life from farming wheat and cattle with his parents in Idaho. He has co-founded four companies. In 2001, the Smithsonian Institute recognized him as a "Pioneer in Technology." Ernst and Young named him a 1997 Entrepreneur of the Year. He took both Onyx Software and Smartsheet from inception through IPO in the software technology space—each achieving in excess of $1 billion market capitalizations. His HarvestWest company was a farmland investment fund that enabled investors to own farmland in the Pacific Northwest as an alternative asset class. 

His current venture, TerraClear, is a combination of his passion in agriculture and his experience in technology. TerraClear is building autonomous mapping and rock-picking robots to clear agricultural fields of rocks, weeds, and pests.

When his nine-year-old nephew was able to operate a robotic rock-picker, Frei knew his design was working. Growing up on a family farm in Grangeville, Idaho, Frei hand-picked a lot of rocks out of fields, and when he saw his then-80-year-old father still picking them up by hand, he envisioned "a Roomba for rock picking." Launched in 2017, TerraClear uses drone photography to map rocks in a field and a treaded claw mounted to a tractor to lift them out of the dirt, and is refining an autonomous picking option. "Our goal is to enable picking a rock every three to five seconds—a five- to ten-times improvement over current methods." 

Launched in 2023, the Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame celebrates the innovative leadership of alums and counts among its inductees Chris Meledandri '81, James Coulter '82, Keith Dunleavy '91, Steven Hafner '91, Shonda Rhimes '91, and Lew Cirne '93.