Treeconomy’s Pre-Seed Raise
Announcing Our Pre-Seed Raise - Growing Nature-Based Carbon Removal.
Company News
Apr 22, 2022
Emily Houston
It’s a big day for Treeconomy. We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a £500K pre-seed round to accelerate our effort to bring trust, transparency, and traceability to nature-based carbon removal. The round was co-led by Climate VC and the Desai Family Office, with participation from A100x, Allegory, and a group of leading angel investors.
Treeconomy’s integrated suite of remote sensing, machine learning, software, and data science tools supports companies in procuring and tracking high-quality carbon removal with confidence and credibility. By directly supporting rural landowners in accessing the voluntary carbon market – and climate-positive income – we’re simplifying carbon supply chains and bringing new credit supply online to meet surging corporate demand.
Fittingly, it’s also Earth Day today. Even more fittingly, this year’s theme is “Invest in Our Planet”, focusing on the urgent need to engage finance and the private sector to combat climate change and restore ecosystems for a prosperous and equitable future.
As Climate Tech VC highlights in the graphic below, innovators in ecosystem restoration and reforestation are badly underfunded, especially in light of the major contribution nature-based solutions can make to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The WEF and UNEP tell us that investment into protecting and restoring nature will have to triple by 2030, and exceed $8.1T by 2050. Private finance currently only accounts for 14% of annual investments in nature. We’re delighted to be backed by a group of investors that share our commitment to combatting climate change and know that the greatest problems present the biggest opportunities. We’re one of the first investments by the visionary team at Climate VC, who are investing in innovative and unusual cleantech startups for gigatonne climate impact.
“We are excited to co-lead Treeconomy’s investment round, enabling them to develop new possibilities for nature-based solutions. Their technology will facilitate high quality carbon removals, with co-benefits for the local environment and biodiversity, all at the massive scale we need to tackle the climate emergency. The founders have a wealth of knowledge and connections in the space and we believe they have the potential to craft the future shape of the industry. We will be watching with anticipation and supporting with enthusiasm.” — Peet Denny, Founding Partner at Climate VC
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the voluntary carbon market and plenty of concerns about the quality of offsets. As conversations from COP26 continue and the Task Force for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets and other initiatives seek to codify best practices, the corporate demand for offsets keeps rising. At such a time, companies need to be able to discern project quality, track their portfolio, and disclose their offsetting activities with confidence and genuine impact. Treeconomy offers not just technology, but a holistic solution to unlock investor-driven financing of afforestation carbon credits that can incentivise reforestation and rewilding at scale. I am excited to support co-founders Harry and Rob and the terrific Treeconomy team in realising their ambitious vision.” — Abhi Desai, on behalf of the Desai Family Office
“We’re hugely proud of what our small and committed team has been able to accomplish in a little over a year.”, said Rob Godfrey, Co-Founder of Treeconomy.
“This investment helps us to move faster and remain at the frontier of nature-based carbon removal. We’ve deliberately partnered with investors that understand the mission, embrace the challenge, and glimpse the size of the opportunity. We work at the intersection of technology, ecology, and finance, and the last 12 months have only highlighted a growing interest in nature-based solutions that deliver deep impact to combat climate change, promote biodiversity, and improve rural livelihoods. With increasingly frenetic activity across voluntary carbon markets, reliable data, transparency, and accountability are now only more important to cut through the greenwash and get money where it can make a genuine difference. Every day is Earth Day at Treeconomy, but this one is special. As the IPCC warns us again: there’s no time to waste. We won’t be wasting any as we put this new investment to good use right away.”
This new funding adds to the more than £300K Treeconomy has earned in innovation grants and competition winnings, and will be used to:
- Grow our amazing team with new hires in business development, ML data science, software, remote sensing, and operations
- Accelerate the development of our pioneering Sherwood platform for project reporting, impact monitoring, and smart credit management
- Expand and execute our extensive project pipeline through new landowner and delivery partnerships
- Develop novel measurement technologies and adapt our solutions to new project types and geographies
Harry Grocott, Co-Founder, and CEO, said:
“Christiana Figueres, the architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, co-authored a book called The Future we Choose, which spells out the need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050, using the term the “decisive decade” to describe 2020-2030. Treeconomy is designed to be an agent for this change, and with this funding, we can get to work on turning this vision into a reality.”
"We’re building a fantastic group of talented and passionate people, and will be launching our Sherwood monitoring platform later this year as well as bringing our first batch of nature restoration projects to life. The mission remains the same; use technology to unlock nature’s value. Now we can think bigger and move faster.”
Are you a landowner interested in woodland creation for carbon removal? An investor in nature-based solutions projects or cleantech ventures? A company seeking high-quality nature-based carbon credits or project monitoring services? A researcher or scientist seeking new collaboration opportunities? Get in touch at hello@treeconomy.co
