Dendra Systems

Though it can be challenging to picture, our world is made of interdependent and intimate relationships between bacteria, mushrooms, bugs, bees, plants, birds, mammals and every other living thing. These relationships form the foundation of healthy natural ecosystems, and we, as humans, rely on those ecosystems to provide our most fundamental needs: clean air, fresh water, nutritious food, medicine…

Unfortunately, human impacts such as intensive agriculture, deforestation, global warming and pollution run-offs from industrial developments have caused 2 billion hectares of land to be degraded, with profound consequences. At a fundamental carbon level, soil degradations and associated biodiversity losses have generated 20% of global carbon emissions – a significant contributor to our climate crisis. Biodiversity decline is also a major cause of international social rife as 1.5 billion people live on degraded land and have increasingly difficult livelihoods.

The trajectory we are on is evident to biologists and gets more apparent to everyone else by the day. Preserving and increasing biodiversity on earth is a complex and urgent challenge. If we remove carbon from the atmosphere but do not succeed at maintaining and increasing biodiversity, we will not sustain life on earth.

Though we had known Susan and her team for a few years, we invested in Dendra Systems when the company evolved from a drone-planting company to a full-stack end-to-end solution for large-scale restoration.

On top of their traditional hardware expertise and IP, Dendra Systems started to combine ecology and plant science with AI and data processing expertise, to deliver precise insights, all through a platform that customers and their providers can use to actually manage restoration projects.

Dendra had to build internal systems to massively parallelize processing to process large quantities of image data (vast landscapes) at very high resolutions in very short time frames to achieve this at the required level of detail. This capability provides them with a profound data advantage over the competition.

With R&D as a core pillar of the company, Dendra was able to restore land at a rate that’s 50x faster and 80% cheaper than incumbents.

Large land-operating customers recognized their benefits in areas like mining and infrastructure, some of whom had already signed multi-year 6-figure contracts with the company.

As momentum accelerates in restoration and ecosystem services, Dendra System can play a foundational role at the intersection of several large markets such as regulatory ecosystem restoration, voluntary carbon offsetting (potential for 200–300 Bn$ investment per year), and reforestation (74 bn$ global market).