EarthOptics Raises $10.3 million in Series A Funding to Accelerate Carbon Mapping

By PR Newswire

EarthOptics has closed its Series A investment round, raising an additional $10.3 million in funding. This funding will enable further growth and expansion across more farmland of its patent-pending soil mapping and machine learning technologies. Lead investor Leaps by Bayer, the impact investment arm of Bayer, is joined in this Series by new investors S2G Ventures and previous investors FHB Ventures, Middleland Capital’s VTC Ventures and Route 66 Ventures.

Jürgen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer, says, “Leaps by Bayer invests in climate-smart solutions that are bringing a fresh perspective and breakthrough technologies to agriculture and allows farmers to contribute to solving global problems.”

With a soil-first focus, EarthOptics aims to transform soil measurement and analysis approaches to give farmers the most accurate view of soil health, compaction and carbon content. This will provide farmers with greater return on investment, promote more active participation in the growing carbon market and increase their abilities to generate a climate-positive impact.

“Scientists estimate that farm soils could store over 60 billion tons of additional carbon,” explains EarthOptics CEO Lars Dyrud. “EarthOptics’ machine-learning technologies will be at the center of helping farmers gain control over returning carbon to the soil by accurately mapping both soil carbon and agricultural practices like tillage. We need to know what’s working and where it’s working for sustainability efforts to be successful at scale. Using the combination of GroundOwl and C-Mapper, we can dramatically reduce the number of costly lab-tested soil samples necessary for verifying carbon credits.”