According to Berlin-based Dryad, wildfires cause up to 20 percent of global CO2 emissions and have cost the global economy nearly $140 billion, not to mention their devastating impact on biodiversity. Combating the challenge, low-cost sensors and a cloud analytics platform are the need of the hour.
Offering real-time wildfire alerts to enable firefighters to put out a blaze before it gets out of hand, solar-powered environmental sensor network platform Dryad has raised €10.5 million in a Series A funding round. The investment will fuel the company’s expansion to fight climate change and protect forests around the world.
Founded in 2020 by Carsten Brinkschulte, Marco Boenig, and Cherian Mathew, the forest monitoring startup offers early detection of wildfires as well as health and growth monitoring of forests using solar-powered gas sensors in a large-scale IoT sensor network. Using its IoT network, sensors can detect wildfires and provide valuable insights into the micro-climate and growth of the forest.
The Series A round was led by German deep tech venture capitalist eCAPITAL and backed by US-based Toba Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and Semtech. Dryad has raised €13.9 million in total, including a €1.6 million grant from Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg.
CEO of Dryad, Carsten Brinkschulte said: “We want to further scale our team and provide critical ultra-early detection and also open the forestry market to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications.”
Dr. Paul-Josef Patt, CEO of eCAPITAL added: “Wildfires represent a huge global problem that has not been resolved effectively for too long. With Dryad’s highly scalable technology, we believe that from now on wildfires will be detected before they can cause damage. We, together with our co-investors, support the company on its mission to save millions of hectares of forest, significantly reduce the threat for humans and animals and avoid the emission of over a billion tonnes of CO2.”
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