Biodiversity startup Darwin secures €1.5M for nature data analysis

"Naturetech" Darwin has raised €1.5M from Astérion and Business Angels active in the climate field. Walid Chergui, former Senior Engineer at Algolia, has also joined its team as CTO.

Darwin is developing a scientific and rigorous methodology aligned with leading international standards such as SBTN (Science-Based Targets for Nature) and the TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures). They assess both impacts on and dependencies on nature. In practice, Darwin evaluates the biodiversity footprint of companies by measuring how their activities contribute to the five pressures identified by IPBES, which are the primary drivers of biodiversity loss.

Dependencies are analyzed based on exposure to ecosystem services. With an increasing workload and the rising complexity and volume of data to analyse, the need for algorithms to organise the data has increased. Darwin supports them at every stage of the development of a biodiversity & nature strategy: data collection and data processing, impact and risk assessment, construction of action plans & trajectories and reporting.

Aurore Falque-Pierrotin, CEO and co-founder of Darwin, stated: "At darwin, we are convinced that the private sector has a crucial role to play in resolving the biodiversity crisis. This fundraising will allow us to accelerate the development of our product, designed to provide consultants and other software platforms with the necessary tools to enable companies to take action. Our indirect approach allows us to collaborate with established ESG players, meeting the growing needs for productivity and accuracy in this emerging market." 

"We chose to invest in Darwin because we strongly believe in their ability to transform the biodiversity sector. They provide a unique solution to overcome the challenges of managing the massive, complex and heterogeneous data that hinders action on biodiversity. Through intelligent automation and robust infrastructure, Darwin goes beyond traditional approaches and facilitates impact analysis, paving the way for more effective biodiversity strategies." added Marine Reygrobellet, Partner at Astérion. 

Thanks to this funding, Darwin plans to rapidly strengthen its Tech & R&D team by recruiting developers, data scientists and ecology experts to enhance its data model and refine its algorithms, roll out its product in France and Europe using its network of consultants and software platforms, and develop new functions that are essential for safeguarding biodiversity.