reforestation
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Michelle Cobb Learned to Read Systems. Now She Is Rewriting the Story of Forests
A computer scientist who spent years explaining invisible cyber risk now works on a problem visible from space: restoring native forests. Her method is the same - understand the system, respect the people inside it, and make complexity useful.
Grant Canary Is Building the Supply Chain a Burned Forest Needs
The former insect farmer behind DroneSeed learned that reforestation is not a planting problem alone. His next act joins native seed, nurseries, carbon finance and buried fire-killed wood into one long view of recovery.
Bryce Jones
Bryce Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Flash Forest, a Toronto-based cleantech startup that uses autonomous drones, AI, GIS mapping and biodegradable seed pods to replant forests faster and more cheaply than traditional hand-planting. A former tree planter and biology graduate from British Columbia, Jones launched Flash Forest in 2019 after seeing how far reforestation methods lagged behind industrial logging technology. The company's stated goal is to plant one billion trees by 2028, with a focus on land that is unsafe or uneconomical for human crews, including post-wildfire terrain.
Ashley Beckwith
Ashley Beckwith is the founder and CEO of Foray Bioscience, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech growing wood, plant materials, molecules, and seeds from single plant cells - no forests required. Out of her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, where she grew wood-like tissue in the lab from a zinnia leaf, she built a company that pairs in-vitro plant cell culture with an AI platform called Pando, billed as an operating system for plant science. The goal: shorten plant development from decades to months and bring biomanufacturing's precision to forestry and conservation.
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.