It’s 2021: Electric cars are cool. TAN, a solar ETF stock is up 400% since May. The Biden administration is fast-tracking environmental policy. This week’s startup sits at the center of the cleantech tsunami.
⚾ The Elevator Pitch:
Today we’re looking at forestry, or the preservation and management of forests. The stakeholders in this space are quite varied - from governments curtailing wildfires, to national parks measuring tree health, to businesses pacing their extraction to not destroy an ecosystem. They have one pain in common: forests are darn hard to size up.
Treeswift is building the next generation of forest monitoring systems. They replace human labor - plotting out land, sampling areas, and measuring trees - to get forest metrics with three steps:
1) A drone collects terabytes of data by flying through harsh forest terrain
2) Treeswift extracts tree metrics using AI and machine learning
3) Stakeholders can view actionable data on a cloud data dashboard
Treeswift can tell users about carbon capture estimations, timber value, deforestation monitoring, growth forecasting, and more.
👇 The Drop Down
Site: https://www.treeswift.com/
Founded: 2020
Stage: Pre-tree (seed)
Tech trend: CleanTech
Traction: Customer interviews, prototypes, a really good website
Team: 3+ PhD’s, Forbes 30 Under 30, Robotics Experts
Steven Chen - Co-Founder & CEO
Elizabeth Hunter - Co-Founder & COO
Michael Shomin - Co-Founder & CTO
Vaibhav Arcot - Co-Founder & Software Lead
- 🌲 The industry is ready to soak up tech
Forestry has largely been untouched by tech. The process of forest measurement is largely manual - and inaccurate. The measurement relies on humans, sampling plots, and other arduous tasks that can be done by a drone. Autonomously. And accurately. That’s more than a 10x improvement. - ⌚ Timing is perfect
It seems like every current event is blowing a tailwind to this startup. COVID has the industry re-thinking how to do manual processes. Drone and AI technology have developed enough to be practical. Environmentalism is picking up steam. These tailwinds are, in fact, helping with the startup’s early adopters. - 👟 Can they go to market?
The team so far is comprised of talented technical people. But the forestry industry seems complex - an amalgam of government players, NGOs, and obscure forestation corporations. Treeswift will need to sort out a winning sales strategy to be able reach out at scale.
🎤 Founders Corner
🤝 Get involved with Treeswift
- Read this amazing article on Treeswift written by The Robot Report
- Follow Steven on Twitter
