Steve Jurvetson's Future Ventures fund invests in the carbon development platform Earthshot Labs
US fund Future Ventures, founded by a venture capitalist with Estonian roots Steve Jurvetson, has invested in the carbon development platform Earthshot Labs. The startup raised $5.5M from the US VCs Earth Foundry, One Small Planet, Parameter Ventures, Sand Hill Angels, Orca Capital, and the US angel investor community Resilient Earth Capital. The lead investor was California-based Acorn Pacific Ventures.
Founded in 2020 in the US by Troy Carter, Earthshot Labs has developed the Landos platform for land assessment. The platform allows to upload an unlimited number of land plots and access environmental data and calculations. The company's solution can find out about the carbon potential of the landscape, help to analyze the land, and automatically create slides and send them to partners.
The startup's technology allows sending reports with information about landscape biomass statistics, the area of the territory, the presence of strictly protected natural objects, national parks, wilderness areas, land without any label, etc. The platform allows users to see what covers the land: grass, trees, crops, shrubs and bushes, or bare ground.
Earthshot Labs' solution makes it possible to find out the right of the land to host a carbon project on the site. The team uses two methodologies: the first is called scoping assessment, which provides a quick assessment of the land's potential. The second is the forest loop process, which includes a detailed comparison of land cover over many years using satellite data for decades and land cover models. The team produces forest growth projections that take into account the interactions between climate, forest species, management decisions, and the local environment.
Founded in San Francisco in 2019 by Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko, Future Ventures focuses on seed- and early-stage companies, with initial checks of between $3M to $6M. The company invests in machine intelligence, sustainable mobility, the future of food, computational biology, high-performance computing, and aerospace.
