Space4Good has received backing from a range of VC investors to scale its forest intelligence platform, expand its team and operations and enhance and diversify its product suite.
Space4Good, the Hague-based environmental insights scale-up, has closed its first funding round for an undisclosed sum.
The funding round, which was led by Arches Capital – a collective of angel investors in the Netherlands focusing on Benelux B2B software companies – also included the participation of Empower Impact, a business angel fund that invests in B2B SaaS solutions focusing on sustainability and impact, and Indigo Ventures, an independent investor initiative that backs purpose-driven technology ventures.
Space4Good was launched in 2017 and collects and analyses data using remote sensing including satellites and drones, and geospatial technology such as geographic information systems and artificial intelligence, to provide companies with operational insights for social and environmental impact.
Forestry focus
Last year, with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), the company launched Forester, a subscription-based platform to support forestry companies and conservation organisations in their efforts to combat illegal deforestation.
Space4Good said it would use the capital from the funding round to scale Forester and bring its deforestation insights to commercial forestry companies operating in tropical regions across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. It will also invest in expanding its team and operations to meet growing international demand for verifiable environmental data and to leverage customer insights to continue to enhance and diversify its product suite, it said.
Speaking to Impact Investor, Alexander Gunkel, CEO of Space4Good, said that although this is the company’s first funding round, it has received grants from the ESA and NSO since 2020 and has also been revenue-generating since that time.
“We started in 2017 as a collective of individuals and in 2020 with co-funding from the ESA and NSO we started to generate revenue and put people on the payroll, growing to a team to 15 people today. Throughout this time our mission has stayed the same- to use space technology for social and environmental impact,” he said.
Fighting illegal deforestation
The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), which began on Monday in Belém, a Amazonian city in the north-east of Brazil, is being billed as ‘the forest COP’. According to Forest Trends, an NGO promoting innovative finance for conservation of forests and other ecosystems, almost three quarters (69%) of tropical forest loss driven by commercial agriculture is illegal deforestation, conducted in violation of national laws and regulations.
Space4Good’s Forester platform has been designed to support those on the frontlines such as forestry managers and security guards by enabling the commercial forestry companies they work for to take targeted, proactive action using near-real-time alerts, deforestation risk predictions, and streamlined reporting for compliance and enforcement. The aim is to help reduce illegal deforestation rates driven by illegal logging and the setting of forest fires, while also lowering associated security and surveillance costs.
“The use and business cases are about protecting forest guards and the business of forestry companies by using observation tech that can detect illegal deforestation activities and by sending alerts direct to the phones of stakeholders on the ground. There is also a predictive layer, which shows where we anticipate future illegal deforestation to occur, allowing companies to engage and work with communities and local businesses to prevent them from encroaching on their land,” said Gunkel, adding that patrolling the large swathes of land managed by the companies is very time consuming, tiring and potentially dangerous.
“This is about protecting forests but also about saving business operational costs and increasing the safety and security of personnel,” he added.
The platform is already being piloted by a for-profit and non-profit forestry organisations in Indonesia and will be rolled out in Brazil as well, protecting over 350,000 hectares of tropical rainforest across both countries.
Impact measurement
Space4Good says its clients have reported a 60% drop in deforestation rates and 80% lower monitoring costs using satellite monitoring, reducing their reliance on labour-intensive field audits.
“The solution we have developed is most impactful for concessions larger than 50,000 hectares because this represents a large area of land that would otherwise be difficult to monitor with randomised controls. We rely on clients to take action on the insights we provide and report back to us,” said Gunkel.
“Data is the starting point for responding to illegal deforestation. The problem is often that it is not being converted into concrete action. The strength of Forester is that it is not just another app but can be integrated into the day-to-day operations of forest management companies,” he added.
