Gaia raises $3M to bring more science to the art of forestry

It’s all good and well to sell a carbon credit, but if you chop down the tree representing that credit as soon as the money hits the bank account, it’s not exactly a win for the planet. Gaia AI is building a tool that can be used for that, and other aspects of forest management, using technologies usually seen in the autonomous vehicle space. The company just closed a $3 million round of pre-seed investment.

The company is currently using lidar and computer vision tech to gather data, but is ultimately building a data platform to tackle some of the big questions in forestry.

“In autonomous vehicles, cars don’t drive themselves off of just LiDAR, or radar, or computer vision. It’s by combining them that you can use the right sensor for the right task,” says Peter McHale, co-founder and CEO at Gaia AI in an email to TechCrunch. “Forestry is no different, and by working with measurements from satellite imagery, above-canopy drones, below-canopy LiDAR and computer vision and forester input, we can use the right measurement to solve the right problem.”

The company was spun out of MIT, and is working to give foresters the tools they need to make data-driven decisions to optimize their bottom line. The company’s data can be used by timber operations, and Gaia AI claims that its technology makes it 100x faster to gather and act on the rich data the company is collecting, processing and reporting on.

Some of Gaia AI’s competitors — such as Treeswift — are using drones or satellite footage to try to approach the same problem space. Gaia’s solution is using multiple sources and approaches at once, and argues that’s a better way to see the forest and the trees...more