Arbonics raises €5.5 million to scale its forest-carbon removal platform to meet growing demand for quality carbon removal
This week forest-carbon removal platform Arbonics announced that it has secured a €5.5 million Seed investment from NordicNinja, Plural and Tilia Impact Ventures to meet growing demand for quality carbon removal.
This investment brings the Estonian company's funding to €7.3 million.
Carbon removal is widely recognised as the only way to reach the Paris Agreement targets, and forests are at the heart of its impact. Studies show nature-based solutions could account for as much as 30 percent of the global mitigation needed, and forests will account for up to 80 percent of this.
Nature alone already removes almost 2 gigatonnes of CO2 every year through growing forests, restored wetlands and healthy soils and could reach as high as 10GT a year by 2050 – the equivalent to all the emissions from the entire global transport sector.
Arbonics was founded in 2022 by CEO Kristjan Lepik and COO Lisett Luik and focuses on monitoring and measuring the transparency, scalability, and impact of l forest carbon projects.
The Arbonics platform combines 30+ layers of data – from on-the-ground sensors to soil readings and satellite imagery – with in-house ecology and forestry expertise to calculate the carbon removal potential of land in European countries remotely and accurately. It can determine everything from which trees are needed to reach the land's potential, to establishing their carbon impact, in seconds.
It's already unlocked new revenue sources for 4,000 landowners through analysis of 200,000+ hectares and the planting of over 4 million trees across multiple European markets. By the end of 2024, it plans to cover 50 percent of Europe's forest.
The tool is already fully developed and in use for afforestation in the Baltics and Finland.
According to Arbonics CEO Kristjan Lepik:
"With this recent funding, we're poised to make a significant impact, not just as a business but as a catalyst for meaningful change.
This year has been tough on the carbon markets, and with concerns around the Voluntary Carbon Market but it's exactly what it needed to mature. It proved just how important it is for the market to be more transparent and proven for forest carbon projects, and at Arbonics, that's what we're building."
This week's investment comes from NordicNinja, Plural and Tilia Impact Ventures.
Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural, said:
"While many new projects are being started on technological carbon removal, those solutions take time.
A luxury we do not have. If we take technologies and empower nature with them, in the way that Arbonics does, scalable solutions can happen already this decade."
Rainer Sternfeld, Managing Partner at NordicNinja, said:
"Arbonics is exactly the kind of innovative, scalable and sustainable solution we look for at NordicNinja.
The company not only has the technology and market understanding, but also the vision and the team to make a significant difference.
We see Arbonics as having the potential to conquer the market in this crucial sector.
That's why we've made this strong bet on their, and our planet's future."
The funding will allow Arbonics to further develop Arbonics' product portfolio to cover the entire forestry lifecycle, grow its team and expand to cover 50 percent of European forests next year.
Lead image: Arbonics founders, Lisett Luik and Kristjan Lepik. Photo: uncredited.
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