Pina Earth, a Munich-based early-stage climate tech startup, had secured $2.5 million in seed funding. The round follows Pina Earth’s pre-seed funding by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator earlier this year.
Seed investment
The round was led by XAnge (which invested in Request Finance and WorkMotion) with participation from Nordstar, business angels such as Gustaf Alstromer (Partner at Y Combinator) and Sundeep Ahuja (Partner at Climate Capital), as well as serial founders such as Lea-Sophie Cramer (Amorelie) and Anselm Bauer-Wohlleb (Alasco, Stylight).
Pina Earth will use the proceeds of the round for several key hires and product development. Moving from pilot projects in Germany, the team aims to scale their impact to forests EU-wide.
Pina Earth works closely with key players in the German forestry sector on over 1,000 hectares of project area already. The first carbon credits will be launched later this year. In the future, Pina Earth aims to scale its impact to forests throughout the EU.
Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Gesa Biermann is excited about the new investors, “The support of this group of top-tier investors is a tribute to the speed at which we have made progress since founding just a year ago,” she explained, “All of this is possible because we have a team of A-players working together on an urgent mission: making Europe’s forests future-proof”.
“XAnge is proud to continue investing in climate tech and support European forest adaptation. Pina Earth’s technology generates high-quality European nature-based carbon credits, for which demand will continue increasing. This investment is a contribution to protecting both the financial and the environmental value forests provide,” said Nadja Bresous, Partner (Paris) and Astrid Moullé-Berteaux, Associate (Berlin) of XAnge.
Revolutionises forest carbon projects
Founded by Dr. Gesa Biermann, Florian Fincke, and Jonas Kerber in 2021 in Munich, Pina Earth revolutionises the way forest carbon projects are created and certified.
Carbon markets pose a way to realign ecology and economy, but setting up a forest carbon project entails high costs, long lead times, and requires expert guidance. These antiquated processes create intransparency and block market access, especially for smaller forest owners.
This is where Pina Earth comes to the picture as it enables forest owners to start high-quality carbon projects through a suite of digital data collection, monitoring, and certification services.
The company is building a suite of digital services for data collection, monitoring, and certification of forest carbon projects. Where today, manual data collection, processing, and hundreds of pages of forms are used to develop a forest carbon project.