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Carbon Crop

CarbonCrop is a climate technology company that helps New Zealand landowners get paid to protect and restore forests by giving them access to carbon markets.

Category
Ag-tech and Climate
Fund
NZVC I
Website
www.carboncrop.com
A tablet shows the aerial forest imagery CarbonCrop's models score.
A tablet shows the aerial forest imagery CarbonCrop's models score.

What Carbon Crop does

Carbon Crop uses AI and satellite imagery to identify eligible forest, including hard-to-assess native bush, and to handle the carbon analysis, monitoring and compliance the Emissions Trading Scheme requires. It issued New Zealand's first AI-enabled voluntary carbon credits granted only for native forest.

The secret

The Emissions Trading Scheme overlooks biodiverse native forest because assessing it by hand costs more than the credits are worth. Machine learning on satellite imagery drops that assessment cost far enough that the value already standing on a landholder's property becomes claimable.

Why NZVC invested in Carbon Crop

NZVC invested in Carbon Crop from NZVC Fund I. We file the company under Ag-tech and Climate on the portfolio wall.

We backed CarbonCrop because a large amount of value sits unclaimed in New Zealand's forests, and the compliance burden of the ETS is the main thing standing between landowners and it. The team, which grew out of Nelson's AI institute, uses machine learning and satellite data to make forest assessment fast and affordable at scale, with a strong focus on native forest that most schemes ignore. As carbon markets mature and native restoration gains value, we saw a technically strong team turning a hard problem into recurring landowner income.

Carbon Crop in the press

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