Forestry AI developer CollectiveCrunch completes EUR450,000 funding round

Espoo, May 19, 2020

The funding will allow CollectiveCrunch to accelerate international expansion and support customer deployments. The company's AI-powered Linda Forest platform combines satellite and harvester data with several other data sources for accurate assessment, management and prediction of forest inventory. The platform is meeting increasing interest in the Nordic and Baltic markets and beyond.

The EUR450K funding round for the Finnish-German startup was widely supported by existing shareholders, with Thominvest as the largest investor. The investment round follows a recent confirmation by the European Space Agency (ESA) to fund 50% of a EUR1M development project to further develop the Linda Forest platform and to bring the service to new markets.

The funding round was completed successfully despite the coronavirus pandemic that arrived in Europe while it was still underway. "Customer commitments in the first quarter of 2020 was twice the revenue of the entire 2019 year. Although the global situation overall is quite challenging, we continue to see good demand ahead," says Rolf Schmitz, CEO and Co-founder of CollectiveCrunch.

CollectiveCrunch brings the power of artificial intelligence to the forestry industry. The startup collects climate, geo and process data and crunches this information into AI models for better prediction of forest inventories and forest management parameters. The product is delivered via a SaaS platform.

Under development: forest inventories

The ESA development funding is used to develop the Linda Forest platform for forest inventories and key aspects of forest planning, investment and management. The newly acquired funding puts the startup in an excellent position to develop forest inventories even further, enhancing and expanding its opportunities for international expansion. "Accurate assessment and prediction of forest inventories is essential for the sustainable and optimal use of wood resources. We are looking to bring the power of AI to drive both business and environmental aspects of forestry," Rolf Schmitz says.

In Finland, CollectiveCrunch has developed its AI solution in partnership with Metsaehallitus, a state-owned forestry enterprise that manages the country's national forest assets. According to Jarkko Lipponen, CPO of CollectiveCrunch, the scope of the effort is considerable.

"If you break forest lands into Linda cells, you get several billions of cells for an area the size of the Nordics. CollectiveCrunch has thousands of attributes of data per cell. This is several orders of magnitude more ambitious in its resolution than anything done in forestry digitalization so far," he describes.

CollectiveCrunch Oy
Rolf Schmitz
Otakaari 5
02150 Espoo
Finland
rs@collectivecrunch.com
+49 151 1972 6650

CollectiveCrunch is an AI leader in the forestry industry. The startup collects climate, geo and process data and crunches this information into AI models for better prediction of forest inventories and forest management parameters. The product of CollectiveCrunch is called Linda Forest and is delivered via a SaaS platform. Read more at www.collectivecrunch.com.

This release was published on openPR.