How Treeconomy went from winning GRAVITY Challenge to raising a £500K pre-seed round

By Mollie Martin & Daniel Owen-Lloyd

At GRAVITY, we’re no strangers to the concept of space-for-earth. One startup also promoting this initiative is Treeconomy, who won challenges in GRAVITY 02 and 03. We caught up with co-founders Harry Grocott and Rob Godfrey to reflect on the program, hear about their experience raising a £500K pre-seed round, and find out how and why they’re using space-enabled technology to innovate in the nature-based carbon market.

Kicking us off, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves for those who don't know you?

H: Sure, my name is Harry, I'm CEO and co-founder at Treeconomy. My first passion was Geography, but I ended up working in wealth management where I got frustrated by the lack of genuine impact investments available - that was really what drove me out of my job and off to go and start a business. I decided to do a master's course at Imperial in Climate Change Management & Finance, and it was here that Rob and I met and started to conceptualise Treeconomy.

R: I'm Rob, Treeconomy’s other co-founder. My academic background is in environmental science of various kinds, but I come from Canada and I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a lot of time in the woods of Northern Ontario whilst growing up, which I think was definitely formative and probably set me on a path towards Treeconomy. It was a role combining climate and forestry science at the University of Toronto that led me towards the subject of nature-based carbon removal, where I was gripped by the idea of not just doing less harm, but actually harnessing nature to undo some of the damage that we've already caused our planet. I decided to enrol in a master’s degree that helped me to combine those interests, and as Harry said, that's where we met.

OK, 30 second elevator pitch for Treeconomy – go!

R: I'll leave that to the CEO!

H: Treeconomy should be seen as a carbon removal company. We’re building technology to more accurately calculate and track carbon that is captured in nature-based systems, predominantly trees and woodlands, but increasingly rewilding landscapes and potentially things like peatland, as well. Tech-for-nature is the real headline piece: we work with landowners to create carbon negative, climate positive landscapes, and we get those accredited as carbon removal schemes, using technology we’ve developed to precisely calculate, monitor and track those tonnes of CO2. We then sell those credits on behalf of landowners at a fair, and that means high, price - ensuring they get paid to remove carbon and restore ecosystems.

We’re a ClimateTech company, in the sense that addressing climate change really is our motivating purpose.

Some might consider it surprising that investing in space can be an asset in the fight against climate change. Can you tell us how satellite technology is impacting what you’re doing at Treeconomy?

H: We’re a ClimateTech company, in the sense that addressing climate change really is our motivating purpose. But we're using space technology as part of that climate solution, and I don’t think that should be surprising, because the SpaceTech revolution is part of driving force behind the whole climate movement as well. There’s that image - the ‘pale blue dot’ - taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990, which was the first time that Earth observation actually changed people's perception of things. It makes you literally look at things in a different way. And this technology, which started as this low-res, fantastic visual, has been developed to the high-res, analytical images we have today, that again allow us to see the earth in different ways.

R: Exactly, and satellite data is getting better, more plentiful and less expensive all the time, so it's one of these exponential areas that we think we can really explore & benefit from today and into the future. By and large, we use high resolution, commercial grade satellite imagery, as well as some ancillary products, to look very closely at forests - right down to 30-centimetre resolution now. We're also using drone data to train models that can reliably count trees using satellite imagery. Drone data is fantastic, but while it gives us spatial resolution, it doesn't give us the amazing temporal resolution that a satellite can offer, with revisit frequencies down to 24 hours – a huge step forward over a human auditor visiting a site every 10 years. This ensures that we're providing carbon credit buyers and natural capital investors with intelligence that is both frequent and reliable.

Drone data is fantastic, but while it gives us spatial resolution, it doesn't give us the amazing temporal resolution that a satellite can offer

You won challenges in both GRAVITY 02 and 03 – a record which is yet to be equalled. What brought you back to the programme for a second round and what's been the impact since then?

H: I’m sure we'll come out of retirement at some point for a final showing! In all seriousness, we found GC02 really valuable, really formative. It gave us that central piece for us to rotate our business and tech build around. The accelerator framework is excellent for focusing the mind, which is especially important for a startup because there's so many things going on. To put yourself in a position where you've got public peer pressure, as well as pressure from the challenge sponsor (and everyone else) is highly motivating. So we loved the process, but there was also a relevant ask from Bardsley of England, saying “we know there's carbon here, we don't know how to calculate it”, which was a nice set up for us and we made the most of it.

R: Yeah, and we didn't expect coming out of GC02 to come back for another necessarily, but the challenge in GC03, with Responsible Risk, was again a relevant one, and also open enough to give us lots of room to explore. Responsible Risk is an ESG consultancy who wanted to look at how Web3, earth observation and smart databasing technologiescould support the transition towards sustainable spatial finance. So all the right buzzwords for us, and as I said they gave us the chance to tailor the challenge specification to ensure that it was not in any way a distraction, but rather on our road map, and falling on subjects that we knew we wanted to explore and get smarter on.

H: Exactly, there was a chance to take the same core underlying technology we developed in GC02, improve it, and then test its deployment in a different ecosystem. Since then, we've used that GRAVITY tech set to go out and secure additional pilots, deployed on core woodland ecosystems, and we've just had our first sale confirmed with a private equity company, which is awesome. So we went, we sprinted, we iterated, and then we reverted back to our main product line, but with a better tech set - thanks to GRAVITY. We're also really happy to be talking and working with Deloitte as well as a supporting partner, so we're glad to have that relationship too.

What advice would you give to the current GRAVITY cohort?

R: Taking the time at the outset to really nail down and get clear on exactly what the challenge provider needs, what you intend to do and then confirm that there's alignment there is an important first step. With so much going on, and so many accelerators, hackathons and programs out there, it can be very easy as a startup to stray sometimes with the opportunities. It’s vital to ensure that you and the challenge provider’s shared understanding of what needs to be done is on track for you as a business, and not a distraction.

Also, a congratulations are in order! You’ve just recently closed your first fundraising round – a great moment for any startup. Can you tell us a bit about that experience, and what it has been like to grow the Treeconomy team over the last couple of years?

H: Thank you! In all honesty it has not been an easy round to raise. We’ve been working on this since October 2021 and at the start it felt as though it wasn’t going anywhere; we were raising a slightly awkward amount, more than a conventional pre-seed but much less than a healthy seed round. Treeconomy has been bootstrapping for 12-14 months so we wanted a larger pre-seed raise, but anything more than £250k feels a bit unnatural for the usual pre-seed investors. We changed tactic and focussed on large angel investors which was successful, and then used this traction to pull in some early-stage VC funds and built momentum that way. We should also say thank you to Abhi Desai and his family office for investing alongside our lead investor, Potential Climate Ventures. Growing the team is one of the most rewarding parts! Myself, Rob, Jesse and Nadja were the core team before our raise – Jesse & Nadja were the technical team that won our GRAVITY Challenge attempts! We’ve recently added Emily & William in Commercial & Technical roles and will have some interns over the summer too. We’re currently plotting our next milestones, and then who we need in addition to hit those. We’ll definitely be hiring again soon.

What's next for Treeconomy?

H: We’re currently building our ‘Sherwood Platform’, which we’re aiming to launch in Q3. This will be our main hub where you can find our projects and analytics, ultimately to the point where you can track every tonne of CO2 through the platform right back to where it's come from. That’s the intent: complete radical transparency, which is necessary to engender trust through the naturebased voluntary carbon market. Alongside this, we’re continuing to really focus on supply, and we’ll have the first five or six of our “own grown” projects on the market within the next eight months. Part of our upstream strategic focus is EcoTech R&D, which is one of the most exciting areas of work for us - looking at how we quantify carbon removal in novel land uses or creating new systems for carbon removal. Rewilding is one example, which is such a charismatic and impactful method for carbon capture and biodiversity, but there’s a few other things as well, including one or two frontier projects that that you should follow us on LinkedIn to keep up with. We won't tell you what they are now, but they're going to be super cool so keep your eyes out!

Follow Treeconomy, Rob and Harry on Linkedin

…There’s a few other things as well, including one or two frontier projects that that you should follow us on LinkedIn to keep up with. We won't tell you what they are now, but they're going to be super cool so keep your eyes out!