carbon-markets
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Mast Reforestation Learned Planting Trees Wasn’t the Hard Part - Financing the Forest Was
Mast began with a fleet of seed-firing drones. Then it discovered the expensive truth: after a megafire, the real bottlenecks are native seed, nursery space, dead wood and patient capital - so it bought the supply chain and buried the business model underground.
Renoster
Renoster is an Austin-based climate technology company that brought scientific rigor and radical transparency to the carbon markets. It began as an independent ratings agency - using LiDAR, satellite imagery, and AI to publicly review more than 200 nature-based carbon projects and over 500 million credits through its Mercury platform. Convinced that most existing credits fell short, the company pivoted from grading the market to fixing it, launching Apollo, an improved forest management program that helps small landowners in Maine store more carbon and generate high-integrity forest carbon credits.
Saif Bhatti
Saif Bhatti is the founder and CEO of Renoster, an Austin-based carbon credit ratings agency that uses remote sensing and open science to grade nature-based carbon projects on whether they actually remove carbon. He started the company in 2019 as anti-poaching technology - a device that listens for gunshots on the African savanna to protect rhinos - and pivoted it into one of the sharpest, most independent watchdogs in the voluntary carbon market. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer and philosopher turned data scientist, he has helped review hundreds of millions of credits and published deep-transparency reports that have rattled some of the world's largest carbon projects.
Earthshot Labs
Earthshot Labs is a public-benefit climate-tech company building the technology and financing rails for nature-based carbon projects at planetary scale. Its LandOS platform guides land stewards step-by-step through carbon project development, while its Biome mobile app uses computer vision and AR to collect field measurements. Backed by a community of 700+ data scientists, Earthshot has helped develop dozens of reforestation, conservation, agroforestry, and improved-forest-management projects worldwide and channeled tens of millions of dollars into ecosystem restoration.
NCX
NCX (Natural Capital Exchange) is a U.S.-based data-driven marketplace that pays forest landowners of all sizes for the natural capital their land provides - starting with forest carbon. Born out of the forestry analytics company SilviaTerra, NCX uses satellites, cloud computing, and machine learning to measure every acre of America's forests, then connects landowners who defer timber harvests with corporations seeking high-quality carbon credits. The company has enrolled thousands of landowners across dozens of states and raised $74.4M to expand natural capital markets.
Max Nova
Max Nova is the co-founder of NCX (Natural Capital Exchange), a San Francisco climate-tech company that counts every tree in America with satellites and machine learning, then pays forest owners to keep them standing. A Louisville-born, Yale-trained computer scientist who once planned to be a radiologist, he started the company as SilviaTerra in 2010 with forester Zack Parisa, built the first high-resolution forest inventory of the entire United States with Microsoft, and turned that data into a marketplace for carbon, wildlife habitat, and fire risk. NCX has raised about $74 million, including a $50M Series B backed by Salesforce's Marc Benioff.
Trellis Group
Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group) is an Oakland-based media, events and peer-network company that has spent more than 25 years helping sustainability professionals turn climate ambition into corporate action. Its newsletters, research, and flagship events - GreenBiz, VERGE, Circularity, GreenFin and Bloom - convene the executives, investors and policymakers building the clean economy.
Troy Carter
Troy Carter is the CEO and Co-Founder of Earthshot Labs, a Sebastopol, California-based climate tech company that uses AI-driven ecological modeling, satellite data, and geospatial analysis to develop, finance, and verify nature-based carbon projects at planetary scale. Before founding Earthshot in 2020, Carter co-founded RIZOME, a bamboo building materials company, and was an early employee at Airbnb. Raised on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and educated at Stanford, he brings a rare combination of entrepreneurial grit and ecological urgency to the carbon markets, with Earthshot managing 50+ client projects across more than one million hectares and directing $55M+ in project financing.