Welcoming Pachama to the PLUS Collective

We are excited to announce the closing of PLUS’s first true climate tech investment in a business called Pachama.

Pachama is a remote sensing platform designed to verify and monitor carbon capture by forests to help finance conservation and reforestation. The company’s platform combines machine learning, satellite imaging, drones, and LiDAR technologies to scale up the protection and restoration of the forests which recapture carbon from the atmosphere to reverse the climate, enabling its enterprise clients (which include Salesforce, Netflix, Amazon and hundreds of others) to offset their carbon emissions into those protecting and restoring the forest.

While this is our first foray into the carbon credits world, we have come to believe that the existence of a trusted marketplace in this space has never been more necessary than it is right now.

On the demand side, targets have been set by the world’s largest companies as they aim to play a role in fighting climate change. As companies progress their decarbonization efforts, carbon offsets play an important role to compensate for emissions along their path to zero. Nature-based solutions are one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways for companies to offset emissions — the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that halting deforestation and promoting forest restoration could contribute to over one-third of all climate change mitigation needed by 2030. Furthermore, these efforts address the increasingly severe risks to biodiversity and create well-paying jobs for local communities.

However, companies tend to hesitate to buy credits without knowing their dollars are truly going towards their intended purpose. A highly fragmented supply side with minimal accountability has led to a lack of trust and transparency in this market, which is where Pachama comes in. Having launched only three years ago, Pachama has become the go-to source to match large enterprise carbon credits buyers to high-quality, vetted and monitored reforestation and conservation projects. The company is also vertically integrating to ensure supply of these prime credits can meet growing demand — the voluntary carbon market is expected to cross $100BN by 2023.

Pachama has worked with 46 different forest project developers across 14 countries over the last three years and counts over 800 organizations among its customers. We believe Pachama is well positioned to continue serving as a trusted partner to businesses and forest project developers alike, and its impact will only continue to grow in lockstep.

We are thrilled to join the Pachama family alongside our artist partners Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, and more as part of the company’s Series B alongside Future Positive, Breakthrough Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and more incredibly smart climate tech investors. Our partners are excited to amplify Pachama’s mission and draw attention to how critical, time-sensitive and cost-effective carbon removal via reforestation truly is. It’s as simple as a comment Diego, Pachama’s CEO, made during one of our diligence calls: we will surely never regret planting more trees and protecting our standing forests.