Loading organizations...
Loading organizations...
Single.Earth develops a platform that integrates natural resource protection with financial mechanisms, enabling the tokenization of forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems. This system provides solutions for environmental data management, compliance, and nature-based compensation, assisting companies in meeting their ESG objectives by channeling funds towards high-impact landowners. The technical approach involves combining natural science methodologies with technology to quantify and monetize ecological value.
The company was co-founded in 2019 by Merit Valdsalu and Andrus Aaslaid. Their foundational insight stemmed from the need to make nature protection financially viable, thereby incentivizing the preservation of ecosystems rather than their exploitation. This approach aims to address the critical challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss by creating a new economic paradigm for environmental stewardship.
Single.Earth serves businesses looking to offset their environmental impact and fulfill their ESG commitments by investing in verifiable natural assets. The platform also benefits landowners by offering a revenue stream for protecting their natural properties. The company's overarching vision is to facilitate the transition to a more sustainable global economy by making ecosystem preservation a profitable endeavor, thereby safeguarding natural environments for future generations.
Single.Earth has raised $8.3M across 2 funding rounds.
Single.Earth has raised $8.3M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Single.Earth is an Estonian greentech startup founded in 2019 that builds a platform to tokenize the ecological value of natural assets, primarily forests, using a digital twin of Earth powered by satellite data, AI, big data, and machine learning.[1][2][3][6] It serves landowners, individuals, and businesses by enabling them to assess, tokenize, and trade nature preservation via MERIT tokens—a nature-backed currency that funds ecosystem protection while helping companies meet ESG compliance for climate and biodiversity goals.[1][2][4] The platform solves the destruction of biodiverse ecosystems by creating scalable business models that monetize nature preservation, lowering barriers compared to traditional carbon projects and fostering a sustainable economy where MERIT integrates into daily transactions.[1][3][5]
With $7.9M raised from EQT Ventures and Icebreaker VC, the company has grown rapidly to 55 team members across 14 countries, onboarding landowners since 2022 and launching early MERIT sales.[1][6][8] It focuses on proven solutions like protecting intact forests (>20 years old) for carbon flux measurement and biodiversity metrics such as species diversity and ecosystem integrity.[1][5]
Single.Earth emerged in 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia, from a team of scientists and innovators alarmed by ecosystem destruction driving climate change and biodiversity loss.[1][2][6] Co-founders Merit Valdsalu (CEO) and Andrus Aaslaid (CTO) led the charge, assembling ~20 scientists and data engineers for R&D starting in October 2021, after pre-seed funding from Icebreaker.vc and Pipedrive co-founder Ragnar Sass in 2020.[1][6] The idea crystallized around building a "digital twin" of Earth's nature—initially digitizing global forests for intactness and carbon sequestration—to make preservation tradable and accessible.[3][6]
Key milestones include securing a virtual asset service provider license in December 2021, beginning landowner onboarding in July 2022, and starting MERIT sales in September 2022 amid a web3 market crash, which tested demand-side innovation.[1][4] This science-first approach, blending ecological expertise with tech, differentiated it early, evolving from forest-focused models to plans for wetlands and grasslands.[5][6]
Single.Earth rides the nature-positive economy trend, tokenizing biodiversity and carbon removal amid rising ESG mandates and web3's shift toward real-world assets post-2022 crash.[2][3][4] Timing aligns with global urgency: forests as the most effective climate/biodiversity solution, yet threatened by degradation, while regulators demand verifiable offsets—Single.Earth's digital twin provides transparent, scalable alternatives to opaque carbon markets.[1][5][7]
Market forces like AI/geospatial advances and blockchain for provenance favor it, disrupting corporate climate action by making nature "inherently valuable" for preservation.[6][7] It influences the ecosystem by open-sourcing models, empowering scientists worldwide, and bridging greentech with finance—similar to Pachama's AI carbon verification but broader in biodiversity and tokenization.[2][6]
Single.Earth is poised to expand its digital twin beyond forests to wetlands/grasslands, enhancing MERIT utility for broader ESG compliance and daily green transactions amid tightening net-zero regulations.[1][5] Trends like AI-driven environmental monitoring, tokenized real-world assets, and biodiversity credits will accelerate growth, potentially scaling to full planetary coverage with community contributions.[3][6]
Its influence may evolve into a foundational "nature-backed financial system," rewarding preservation at scale and outpacing rivals through science rigor—turning ecosystems into tradable wealth if demand rebounds strongly.[4][7] This positions it as a GreenTech leader, directly combating the planetary crisis its digital twin maps.
Single.Earth has raised $8.3M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Single.Earth's investors include EQT Ventures, Icebreaker.vc, Andrus Purde, Martin Tajur.
Single.Earth has raised $8.3M across 2 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $8.0M Seed in July 2021.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 1, 2021 | $8.0M Seed | EQT Ventures, Icebreaker.vc | |
| Jun 1, 2020 | $340K Seed | Icebreaker.vc, Andrus Purde, Martin Tajur |