Earthshot Labs

Somewhere right now a person is standing in a half-cleared forest holding a phone, pointing the camera at a tree. The app on the screen measures the trunk, logs the species, and quietly turns that single observation into a line of data that an investor in another hemisphere will eventually trust. That app is called Biome. The company behind it is Earthshot Labs, and this small ritual - phone, tree, data - is the whole pitch in miniature.

01 / WHO THEY ARE NOWThe company turning trees into trust

Earthshot Labs is a Public Benefit Corporation based in Sebastopol, California, with roughly 35 employees and a much larger orbit - a community of more than 700 data scientists and domain experts who treat ecosystems as a data problem worth solving. It builds software and provides expert guidance for developing and financing nature-based carbon projects: reforestation, conservation, agroforestry, and improved forest management. Less glamorously, it does the paperwork, the modeling, and the diligence that make those projects believable to the people writing checks.

The company sits at an awkward, useful intersection. Part climate-science shop. Part fintech. Part GIS lab running on Google Earth Engine, satellite imagery, and machine learning. It is the rare climate startup that is equally comfortable discussing forest mortality curves and offtake pricing.

02 / THE PROBLEM THEY SAWCarbon markets had a credibility problem

Here is the inconvenient truth Earthshot started from: the voluntary carbon market is enormous, growing, and frequently embarrassing. Degraded land holds, by the founders' own estimate, multi-trillion-dollar carbon potential. Yet too many forest-carbon projects have been overstated, under-measured, or quietly wrong - and every scandal makes the next honest project harder to fund.

The root cause is mundane. Good carbon projects are slow and expensive to develop, and the data underneath them is thin. Tree measurements are collected by hand, ecological models are guesses dressed as forecasts, and an institutional investor has every reason to be skeptical. The market did not lack ambition. It lacked diligence.

03 / THE FOUNDERS' BETFrom a damaged coral reef to a data company

CEO and co-founder Troy Carter traces his climate commitment to watching coral reef damage in 2015. Before Earthshot he co-founded RIZOME, a venture making climate-positive bamboo to replace wood, steel, and concrete - a man with a habit of attacking carbon from odd angles. He pairs business strategy with a stated wish to "restore human relationships with nature," which is the kind of line that sounds soft until you notice he has spent years building the financial machinery to back it.

Co-founder Patrick Leung saw the other half of the problem: a serious shortage of reliable tree and ecosystem data. His answer was to make measurement cheap enough that anyone could do it. Together the two founders bet that the bottleneck in nature finance was not money or goodwill, but trustworthy data and the software to organize it.

04 / THE PRODUCTLandOS and Biome, the two-handed engine

Earthshot's answer comes in two parts. LandOS is the platform that walks a land steward through the entire carbon development process step by step, with ecosystem analytics that compress the time and cost of getting a project off the ground while handing investors and corporate buyers the diligence they have been missing. Biome is the field tool: a mobile app that uses computer vision and augmented reality to turn tree measurement into something fast, cheap, and reliable - reliable enough that ordinary people can collect site data, and even earn income for it.

05 / THE PROOFThe numbers do some of the talking

Earthshot reports having helped develop 50 or more reforestation, conservation, agroforestry, and improved-forest-management projects across more than a million hectares, while directing somewhere between $55M and $65M+ into project financing. Those figures are the company's own, and they describe reach more than revenue - but they are the kind of numbers a skeptical investor can at least check.

The partner roster reads like a who's-who of conservation: BirdLife International, Fauna & Flora International, Plan Vivo, Everland, and the OPEC Fund all appear in Earthshot's orbit. The competitive set is real too - Pachama, Sylvera, NCX and others are circling the same problem - which is usually a sign the problem is worth solving.

06 / THE MISSIONRestore nature at planetary scale

Earthshot's stated mission is to "restore and protect nature at planetary scale." It is an enormous sentence for a 35-person company, and the founders know it - which is precisely why they incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, writing the mission into the legal charter so it cannot quietly evaporate the moment growth and purpose disagree. The vision underneath is almost stubbornly practical: make standing forests and restored ecosystems generate durable, science-backed value, so that conservation becomes the financially obvious choice rather than the noble exception.

07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWThe phone, the tree, and the future

Climate finance is about to get either much bigger or much more cynical, and the deciding factor will be whether anyone believes the underlying data. If carbon credits remain a black box, the money walks. If they become as auditable as a balance sheet, restoration scales. Earthshot is wagering on the second future, and building the tools to drag the market toward it - one measured tree at a time.

So return to that person standing in the forest, phone raised toward a tree. A year ago, that measurement might have lived in a notebook, lost or doubted. Now it flows into LandOS, gets checked against satellite data, and helps a project earn financing that puts more trees in the ground. The ritual looks the same. What changed is that someone, somewhere, finally believes the number. That is the whole company, and it is not nothing.