€5M Seed Round closed 😀🌲

I am super happy to announce that we have just closed our €5M Seed funding round. It is quite a milestone for us and will allow us to further accelerate on our mission to fight the negative impact in our forests through climate change.

Thank you to my co-founder Jodok Batlogg and the wonderful energetic team of Tree.ly to get through all hoops required to close such a round. Last year we raised our Preseed-Round from enthusiastic believers (specifically Karl "Charly" Kleissner , Johannes Moser , Holger Temme , BTV VIER LÄNDER BANK , Dieter Rappold , Rudolf Knünz, Philipp Tomaselli , Johannes Steurer and the great team from pioneer impact https://www.pioneer-impact.tirol ). It was with zero revenues but a bold mission: to innovate how positive climate impact can be achieved with forest owners and enterprises by enabling climate protection projects in local forest.

This Seed round investments came from PortfoLion Capital Partners , AWS Founders Fund aws Gründungsfonds , SymbiaVC and tba network - huge thank you for believing in our team and our mission to Aurel Pasztor , Peter Mühlbauer , Markus Jandrinitsch , Johannes Oberdanner, Alex Burger and Eva Ogriseg.

Today we are proud to have achieved significant progress. Tree.ly has secured contracts spanning 105,299 hectares across Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. We have already locked in an additional CO₂ storage capacity exceeding 2.8 million tons CO2 and could deliver on a 3x year-on-year growth. With enterprise customers we have already secured more then €3M in TCV and have some exciting deals in our sales pipeline.

The fund raising was not an easy walk in the park due to the public pressure the came on VCM (Voluntary Carbon Market) with scandals from forest projects in the southern hemisphere, where more than 90% of credits of such projects have been found to be worthless. However on the positive side it opened a new opportunity for high quality, regional projects - within proper EU-legislation, from forest owners that own their forest for decades or hundreds of years, with tight yearly monitoring and certification from trusted authorities like TÜV AUSTRIA Group.

We executed on that opportunity, winning local forest owners mainly in the DACH-region and now expanding into more European countries, and winning enterprises that support to fight climate change by support of a trusted team and forest projects just around their corner. Where one can visit the forest and explore the measures that have been taken and are yearly verified. This success commercially as well as from the impact side in tCO2-stored created momentum with hard numbers and led to our Seed round.

We will use those funds to expand our SaaS product offering, our methodology and services into more countries and increase our foot print in each country.

On a personal note, this is my 20th successful VC-backed funding round in my startup life since 1999, but in a way this is the most important one, as the topic is so extremely important for all humans, and as we can contribute to save the nature around us, that hopefully will still exist in many decades to come, for our children and their children and many more generations.

Stay tuned for more exciting stories on helping our climate towards a global net zero.