Landseed launched a financial company model built around Earth Credits, using sensors to measure ecological outcomes and convert them into assets conservation organizations can sell. The newly launched company says it wants a market that can help projects raise money instead of relying only on grants or philanthropy.
Greg Curtis on the last four years
Greg Curtis spent the last four years at Holdfast Collective before cofounded Landseed with Alex Roessner and Eric Dinerstein. He said the idea grew out of "seeing how difficult it was for the conservation partners to raise money, which creates a lot of risk for them."
Landseed uses sensor hardware and a structured data feed as the first layer of its model, calling that hardware the Earth Pulse Node. The sensors record every 10 minutes and detect the presence or lack of wildlife species, moisture levels, relative humidity, water temperature, weather condition, soil moisture, fresh water quality, and soil carbon.
Earth Credits and voluntary markets
Landseed then verifies the ecological outcomes gathered by the sensors and turns them into Earth Credits, which belong to the conservation organization that generated them. Those credits can be sold on voluntary markets, giving the project a potential recurring revenue stream rather than a one-time funding event.
Curtis said the credits are "more holistic than just looking at carbon emissions." That matters because Landseed's model goes below the canopy and measures more than carbon sequestration, so the asset is tied to a wider set of ecological outcomes than a single metric.
Buyers and the next layer
Buyers of the credits would be companies and possibly municipalities looking to protect their natural resources, along with foundations and private philanthropy organizations. Curtis said chief investment officers of those foundations may put part of their endowments into this asset class or other nature-based financial asset purchases.
Landseed plans to measure settings acoustically in the future, adding another data layer to the Earth Pulse Node system. The open issue is how quickly that sensor data can become a trusted, tradable credit at scale, because the model only works if conservation projects, buyers and the verification step all line up in the same market.
