Forest tokenisation platform single.earth raises $7.9 million

Forests, wetlands, and “other” valuable earth resources have a new friend in single.earth as the platform provides for the tokenisation of land and allows landowners to generate profits from their holdings via carbon and biodiversity credits, as opposed to harvesting the raw materials. To this end, the startup has raised $7.9 million in seed funding from EQT Ventures, existing investor icebreaker.vc and Pipedrive founders Ragnar Sass and Martin Henk.

Single.earth is reporting that the new funds will be used to create the world’s first nature-backed financial system using the firms’ proprietary MERIT tokens. The Estonian startup uses a combination of satellite imagery, big data, and machine-learning to map out global carbon models and then converts this analysis to a tokenisation format that places a real-world ecological value on our most precious resource, without the need to destroy it.

CTO Andrus Aaslaid commented, “The most advanced technology solutions -- blockchain, tokenization, AI, satellite data, and more -- have longed for real and impactful use cases like this for some time now. Riding the wave of crypto, surpassing a record $2 trillion market cap in 2021, we couldn’t be prouder to be leading the way in this bold new approach.”