Heidi Lindvall - Pale Blue Dot

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Risk and dependency - Helping corporates in understanding their reliance on nature risk and dependencies, and for them to be able to quantify those in $ value terms. Startups that can help quantify the impact of our food systems on Nature are also exciting.

• Natural solutions to carbon removal - For example, seaweed being used as a carbon sink. There are questions about what type of these solutions are VC fundable and will deliver required returns but there are lots of exciting solutions emerging.

• Fungi - It's such an amazing, magical world and I’m interested in fungal discovery platforms where we can really try to figure out that, what materials, what ingredients, what chemicals can be replaced by fungi.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Nala: Using existing data to help corporates understand nature risk and dependencies. Helping corporates quantify the extent of their interactions with nature to support nature-positive business decisions.

• Pivotal: Pioneering ways to better measure biodiversity – affordably, efficiently, accurately, and at scale. The improved biodiversity is turned into tradable assets, creating a way for people to invest in the restoration of nature across the world.

Xavier Lorphelin - Serena

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• MRV - Specifically solutions able to encompass multiple measurement factors and indicators, including carbon / greenhouse gases, water, soil and biodiversity. This platform approach will better respond to the growing need for corporates to identify, assess and report on different types of environmental risk throughout their value chain.

• Water-tech - Solutions such as water footprint measurement, smart water management, precise irrigation systems, wastewater treatment and recycling. Water is essential to tackling the interdependent global challenges of adapting to climate change, conserving biodiversity and combating desertification.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• The Landbanking Group: Ambition to create a new asset class called Nature Equity, which will be accounted for on corporate balance sheets.

• Darwin: Model the impacts and dependencies that businesses have on the environment and the Earth's system, not just climate change.

• Kumulus: Design and operate machines that turn air into fresh drinking water.

Chris and Simon - Pelican Ag

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Farm to cell: We’re permanently having to temper our excitement. Frontier science across the 'farm to cell’ value chain, alongside the myriad of climate, biodiversity & health tailwinds, have forged a crucible of immense innovation, in previously un-digitalised worlds. 

• Data and AI: How will data & AI allow us to build reliable, predictive ‘large earth models’; ultimately feeding off almost infinite datasets; what will these yield, what insights will they provide to steer land stewards, governments, health systems, supply chains & consumption?’

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Better data for land stewards: One area we’re excited about is how can we reduce friction and inertia? With a view to creating on ramps for greater regen adoption on the one hand, and the demand from the public for nutritious whole food on the other. Part of the answer lies in empowering land stewards with accurate risk based decision making and agronomy powered with biological data. 

• Edacious: We’re excited by startups helping to create an environment of continuous improvement; a race to the top in food quality, where highly nutritious food is visibly and verifiably coming from farms with healthy soils. Hence our recent investment in Edacious, enabling nutrient density measurement and benchmarking throughout the food system. 

Jahed Momand - Cerulean Ventures

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Conservation Asset Markets - We’re excited by startups working on "conservation outcome assets." to create market price discovery for the ecosystem services nature provides. Nobody thought we'd have a $120 billion daily trading volume in commodity futures 30 years ago - we believe nature as an asset could follow a similar path. Creating these tradable conservation assets is essential for properly valuing ecosystem services in our economy.

• Ocean & Marine Biodiversity - We're interested in companies developing economic models to make marine conservation profitable. Particularly interesting is companies that are starting to index marine biodiversity to understand what actually exists in our oceans. This data can then be monetized by marine protected areas for bioprospecting - the search for novel proteins and microbial species that can be used for pharmaceutical, biotech or industrial processes.

• AI/ML Applications in Nature Data - We're looking for companies that have figured out how to get paid to collect hard-to-obtain environmental data, then apply massive computation to extract insights. We're particularly excited about companies working on geographic embeddings in Earth observation. These companies are building systems that can answer complex questions about land use and environmental change in seconds. Tasks that currently take teams of consultants months to figure out.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• New Atlantis: Provides Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) with a viable business model by making marine biodiversity an investable asset class - building a repository of novel protein sequences derived from both natural marine sources and AI-driven discovery.

• Meridia: They have built the data infrastructure necessary to address deforestation reduction due to global commodity demand, and they have done so by engaging smallholder farmers in the global cocoa and coffee supply chains. 

• Ocean Ledger: Precision analytics to design, implement & monitor coastal mitigation and adaptation.

Elissa Glorie - Twynam

 What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Critical Minerals - The energy transition could have detrimental consequences to nature if we aren't thoughtful about the infrastructure to power it. It’s exciting to see emerging companies extracting minerals and metals from waste and even waste-water at a fraction of the cost and with minimal footprint, chemicals and disturbance to the natural world.

• Decarbonizing Aquaculture - our fastest growing and second largest protein source globally has an opportunity to clean up. The wave of improvements in animal health for on land agriculture could be heading to the seas and we see an opportunity for decarbonization to play a big part here too.

• CCUS with Watertight MRV - Carbon capture and utilization technologies are growing and promising solutions are emerging that accurately measure carbon, as opposed to model it.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Hoofprint Biome: Microbiome engineering to reducing enteric methane. Hoofprint's probiotics release natural enzymes in a cow’s stomach that eliminate methanogens.

• Vycarb: De-acidifying and decarbonizing our oceans (and atmosphere) with ocean alkalinity enhancement. Vycarb’s novel sensing array also measures carbon capture in situ to give a fully measurable, affordable and permanent (10,000 + years) carbon offset.

Antony Yousefian – TFT.VC

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why? 

• Health with Nature - Human health is at the core of our investment focus. As both political and corporate entities shift their attention toward health, the food industry presents a particularly compelling business case. By prioritising the health of humans, animals, and plants, we align with nature’s systems, creating both economic and ecological value. A key area of opportunity lies in measuring the nutritional density of food and tracking its quality, as consumers, regulators, and businesses increasingly recognise the link between nutrition, health outcomes, and environmental impact.

• Agentic AI & Robotics - The rapid advancement of AI is surpassing expectations, with costs falling and barriers lowering at an unprecedented rate. AI agents have the potential to navigate the complexity of natural systems, enabling smarter decision-making and transforming procurement within supply chains. Additionally, AI is accelerating the capabilities of robotics, significantly reducing the cost of data collection in natural environments—from plant monitoring to soil health assessment. As a result, the demand for high-quality primary data is set to surge, unlocking new opportunities for efficiency and insight across the food and agriculture industries.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Edacious: is transforming nutrient density measurement across the food supply chain. As consumers and governments scrutinise food quality, their technology offers transparency. Starting in the U.S., they aim to reveal variations in food quality and address the question: “What did my food eat?” Their upcoming report is expected to shift understanding of the connection between soil health and nutrition, highlighting regenerative agriculture's importance.

• Ignitia: A prime example of AI’s transformative power, Ignitia is dramatically accelerating product development in weather prediction. What once took months can now be accomplished in days, allowing farmers to make faster, more informed decisions. This speed lowers user costs and expands market opportunities, making precision weather forecasting more accessible and valuable to the agricultural sector.

• Veridi Technologies: Measuring biodiversity can be challenging, but sometimes the most straightforward approach is just to look. Veridi is making this possible by enabling direct soil examination through AI-powered automated microscopes. Their technology rapidly identifies nematodes—key predators within the soil food web—offering a real-time, high-resolution view of soil biodiversity. This method could provide even greater insight into ecosystem health than eDNA analysis, unlocking new opportunities to assess and enhance soil function at scale.

Edward Thorne – Sand River

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Resilience Markets - We're excited about the emergence of 'resilience markets' as opposed to natural capital markets. Resilience markets focus on delivering tangible value to human populations, economies, or markets in terms of mitigation or risk management.  Fresh water is an underrepresented but potent space within resilience markets. There are close connections between healthy water cycles and costs related to flood mitigation, fire mitigation, water filtration and cooling.

  Nature Data Development - Another area of interest is the development and application of nature data. The focus is not just on the data itself, but on building useful, actionable tools and creating the infrastructure for this data to be applied in various contexts. The goal is to enable everyday market operators, businesses, investors, and supply chain managers to factor natural capital economics into their decision-making processes.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Water Scarcity Impact: Water scarcity is beginning to have a material impact on certain industries, such as data centers, silicon chip production, and agriculture. The increasing demand for data centers, driven by AI, is creating new pressures on natural capital dependencies, particularly in terms of energy and water usage.

• Potential of Fungi: Fungi have attractive properties compared to man-made counterparts, including biological capabilities and the ability to be produced consistently and cheaply. There is significant undiscovered intellectual property in this category, making it a frontier area of natural science with much to be explored.

• Carbon and Nature Integration: We’re enthusiastic about the blending of discussions around carbon and nature or biodiversity. There is growing interest in nature-based restoration carbon projects with real commercial business cases, occurring at scale. Recent announcements of large nature-based carbon dioxide removal projects indicate a trend contrary to the rhetoric that nature-based carbons are outdated.

 Max Ament - Earth

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Picks & Shovels in the Carbon Markets - Namely alternative carbon registries with superior technology, novel mechanisms around MRV, improved trust and machinery for credits. This isn’t anything new, but we’ve been viewing carbon as a toolkit more than a product for quite a while now - embedding credit generation, MRV, sale into other products vs. building standalone tools, and focusing on high-quality credits to account for the uncertainties of recent years. We see similar exciting stuff happening in biodiversity. 

• Geo-engineering for Weather & Temperature - As we’ve comfortably cruised past 1.5 degrees at this point, “flattening the curve” is becoming ever more important, and we’ve been interested in following the trajectory of a couple of businesses in the US & beyond developing novel compounds to cool the planet short term as we sort ourselves out. The lack of a European champion here is concerning, and we’d like to see more activity here from our colleagues on the continent.

• Biodiversity Monitoring, Measurement & Protection - 2024/5 already feels like the year in which climate-related disasters hit close to home. Valencia and California are landmark examples in developed nations, and we expect this same trend to start hitting products we have come to rely on as standard - chocolate, coffee, olive oil, almonds etc. This creates a major opportunity for biodiversity monitoring, measurement and protection

At Earth we remain focused on our thesis of Climate Dynamism - founder-led solutions that acknowledge governments can no longer be relied upon. No regulatory dependencies, no subsidies - just foundational technologies with novel incentive mechanisms that generate returns whilst protecting the planet.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Hula Earth: Building a data layer to unlock the power of biodiversity monitoring

• Cecil: The launch of their new data platform to build consensus and consistency across nature data-sets

• Make Sunsets: Cooling the Earth by making clouds more reflective 

• Epoch: Building the largest, dynamic database of commodity producers in the world to help decarbonize and protect supply chains

Matt Portman - Symbiotic Projects

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Conservation Finance With the collapse of the REDD+ carbon market, financing conservation has largely reverted to philanthropy or government-led initiatives such as payment for ecosystem services. I'm eager to connect with entrepreneurs who have ‘cracked the conservation-finance code’ and figured out how to link capital markets to the protection of primary ecosystems.

• AI for Nature I'm exploring how AI can unlock new sources of value from nature. Basecamp Research recently launched an AI-driven platform designed to revolutionize biological design by building a comprehensive biodiversity database. Their technology looks to advance fields like medicine and environmental conservation. If there are other exciting AI applications in biodiversity, I’d love to hear about them!

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• Courageous Land: Large-scale agroforestry, meeting the growing demand for food, ingredients, noble hardwood and carbon credits.

• Ecosystem Restoration Standard (ERS): Certifies ecosystem restoration projects on the carbon markets. Our standard is designed to empower efforts that combat climate change, uplift biodiversity, and improve livelihoods.

• Terraspect: Helps project developers and buyers manage community payments with full traceability anywhere in the world.

Tariq El Haj Omar - Kayan Ventures & Polynate

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Food Security - Primarily in the form of regenerative agriculture solutions. Half of the Earth’s topsoil has been lost due to industrial agricultural practices that are ultimately unsustainable and uneconomical. The use of toxic pesticides, monocultures, genetically engineered species and antibiotics to manage the health of livestock have all caused untold damage to the soil, biodiversity and human health. This does not mean we should avoid the use of technology in agriculture, but rather apply it in harmony with nature.

• Water Security - Primarily in the form of distributed water treatment and production. Simply put, water is so critically important that it profoundly shapes global geopolitics and impacts the migration of all mammals on Earth, including humans as water refugees. 2 billion people facing absolute water scarcity is nothing short of a generational challenge. Low-cost technologies that enable distributed, self-sustaining wastewater treatment and water production are high-leverage tools in addressing this challenge.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

I’m a believer in ‘necessity as the mother of invention’ and the role of developing markets in ushering a wave of cost-effective solutions to address food and water security. Some examples include:

• Palmear: Develops cost-effective bioacoustics devices to capture sound signals from trees and uses AI algorithms to detect pest infestations, enabling farmers to minimize the use of toxic pesticides and lower operating costs.

• Majik Water: Develops air-to-water technologies for arid and semi arid regions. It uses solar thermal energy and material science to sustainably produce clean water in a low cost, energy efficient way.

Anna Lerner Nesbitt - Climate Collective

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Private Sector Education - I can't get over that private-sector financial flows causing DIRECT harm to biodiversity reach $5.3 trillion annually - and that annual public subsidies incentivizing biodiversity damage total $1.7 trillion, distorting trade and escalating pressure on natural resources. So, for 2025 I'm looking for teams and solutions that can help us reverse this perverse trend. Private sector is clearly not able to see their dependencies on nature and connect that to direct business risk - so we need solutions that help them understand and quantify their dependencies to nature and offer them ways to build resilience of their value chains.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• LGND: I've been thrilled to follow how the bright minds behind Ode Partners and the nonprofit Earth Observation solution Clay are launching a venture called LGND that is working to bridge the gap between large Earth observation (EO) models and end-use applications, a space that require a dedicated infrastructure and new class of algorithms.

• AI for Nature Tech Startups - At Climate Collective we received 350+ applications for our AI x Climate Accelerator - many of them are incredibly exciting Nature Tech solutions I think you will all see more of in 2025.

Romain Diaz – Satgana

What Nature Tech focussed challenge areas are you most excited about and why?

• Biomaterials - As industries shift from fossil-based to bio-based materials, nature-derived solutions (mycelium, algae-based bioplastics, plant-based textiles) are scaling up. This aligns with Satgana’s interest in hardware and materials innovation.

• Regenerative Agriculture - Agriculture is one of the largest contributors to emissions, but regenerative practices (e.g., cover cropping, agroforestry, biochar) can turn soil into a massive carbon sink. With increasing interest from corporates (Scope 3 emissions reductions) and farmers facing soil degradation, this space has strong economic and climate potential. Furthermore, it holds the potential for going beyond carbon sequestration by enhancing biodiversity, water retention, soil nutrition, social co-benefits and farmers’ resilience.

• Biodiversity markets - The global push for biodiversity conservation (e.g., TNFD, EU nature laws) is creating new markets for biodiversity credits and nature restoration projects. Investors are also looking at tech-driven reforestation and forest carbon management solutions, such as AI-driven forest monitoring, biotech for tree growth acceleration, and new financial mechanisms for biodiversity credits.

What Nature Tech startups are you most excited about and why?

• OroraTech: Developed a system that utilizes thermal-infrared cameras mounted on 3U CubeSats to detect wildfires. These satellites provide rapid detection and monitoring capabilities, enabling timely responses to emerging fires. By providing early detection and monitoring, OroraTech aims to mitigate the devastating impacts of wildfires on communities and ecosystems while ensuring that carbon remains durably locked in forests.

• Amini AI: A Satgana portfolio company, Amini is an African startup that focuses on environmental data infrastructure, particularly for climate and agricultural applications. It leverages satellite imagery, AI, and IoT data to provide insights into deforestation, soil health, water resources, and biodiversity. This makes it highly relevant to Nature Tech, as it enables better management of natural resources, regenerative agriculture, and climate resilience.