Today we are excited to announce our co-investment in CarbonSpace, a Rockstart portfolio company. The €900k seed round was led by The Yield Lab Europe with Rockstart as co-investor. CarbonSpace is a Rockstart AgriFood 2020 portfolio company and this funding round marks Rockstart’s second investment in the company. The startup plans to use the funding to scale its business in the EU and the US with focus on food and forestry supply chains, strengthen its technology core by integrating new sources of data and optimizing ML algorithms, finalize the self-onboarding platform and developing new products.
Emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) account for 20-24% of global emissions.. However, companies in the food and forestry sectors lack scalable and cost-effective instruments to measure the footprint of their operations and supply chains. Founded in 2020, CarbonSpace has developed a satellite powered carbon footprint monitoring platform to bring a new level of transparency to these organizations. CarbonSpace’s proprietary AI core processes several layers of satellite, sensor, and inventory data, which yields high spatial and temporal resolutions and allows for reliable assessments across geographies.
Commenting on the round, Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart states:
“Our reason to invest in 2020 was to help the team apply their impressive tech competencies to a worthy mission – finding a way to help land managers reduce carbon emissions. With this new round, we continue to support the team in commercial roll out, and we are excited for the progress we are already seeing.”
Oleg Demidov, CarbonSpace CEO also commented:
“We’re happy to receive funding from the two leading funds in the agrifood sector. Our immediate plan is to scale business development efforts in the food and forestry markets and help more customers quantify the carbon footprint of the farms, fields and forests within their supply chains. Another focus area is tracking the performance of nature-based solutions globally. The CarbonSpace platform can be an effective tool to guide public and corporate investment and to facilitate the global transition to Net Zero”.
David Bowles, General Partner, The Yield Lab Europe said:
“We are really excited to invest in CarbonSpace and be part of the journey to bring a new level of transparency to carbon footprint monitoring. Their technology is set to create the global standard and make a real, measurable impact on carbon emissions.”
The team is also working on a global carbon map. Here are is a sneak peak into it. We are looking forward to seeing it live.
Rockstart AgriFood has invested in 29 startups since its launch in mid-2019, making the fund one of the most active AgriFood investors in the world. The Rockstart AgriFood portfolio companies have collectively raised >€10m in total thus far. Rockstart AgriFood received more than 600 applications this year and selected startups have started in August the Rockstart AgriFood accelerator program.
Congrats to the team and looking forward to seeing them grow further in the coming years.
