Sucking up CO2Forest-planting drones.
The Big Idea
Each year deforestation accounts for 10-15% of global emissions, as an estimated 15 billion trees are cut down around the world. Any chance of limiting temperature rise to 2°C requires protecting and replanting these trees on an unprecedented scale in the decades to come. The planet’s success will depend on new technologies that speed up the process and improve the economics of growing forests.
How it Works
Dendra is a full-stack ecosystem restoration platform, from planting seeds with drones to forecasting how vegetation is trending. They serve regulated industries for whom restoration is typically manual, costly, and inefficient. Dendra cuts the planting time from months to days and provides real-time analytics that customers will rely on for multi-decade ecosystem management.
Unfair Advantage
Dendra’s leg up is that they combine automated tree planting with data collection and analytics. Automating expensive and labor-intensive seeding processes is an advantage by itself, but those drones also capture super high-resolution data required to reliably identify plant species, spot risks like erosion, and quantify biodiversity—a level of insight impossible with other approaches.
SUSAN GRAHAM CEO & CO-FOUNDER
Susan previously co-founded two software companies. She holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Oxford University.
Follow: @DrSusanMGraham
MATTHEW RITCHIE CFO & CO-FOUNDER
Matthew is formerly the Director at Asian Carbon Management in Singapore. He holds an MBA with distinction from Oxford University.
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