Overstory announces new funding from top-tier US and European investors
Our global platform for monitoring trees in real time is a crucial tool for stopping deforestation and wildfires.
The headlines are inescapable. Wildfires are ravaging the same places over and over again, and spreading to new ones. In the US, an average of 7 million acres has burned every year for the past decade. Power outages, when paired with extreme weather, are threatening lives. As many as 700 people died in Texas this winter because they were without electricity. Deforestation is so devastating that 100 nations pledged this week to stop it. And biodiversity loss is threatening a million species with extinction.
The causes of these problems vary, but there is one common thread throughout — the need to closely track what’s happening with trees and plants, at a global scale and in real time. That’s what we’re focused on at Overstory. It’s what inspires us, what drives us to do more, better, faster. Because we know it will have an impact.
Today we’re excited to announce a big step in our journey to build the global vegetation intelligence platform. We’ve closed a $3.9 million Seed+ round, led by CapitalT and Moxxie Ventures.
We’ll use the new funding to continue building out the Overstory product — a vegetation intelligence SaaS platform that is initially aimed at helping utilities reduce the risk of power outages and wildfires caused by trees and plants touching their power lines.
In California, power lines have caused more than 1,500 wildfires in the past eight years, including the deadliest blaze in the state’s history. The state’s largest utility will spend about $1.4 billion this year removing more than 300,000 trees and pruning an additional 1.1 million. But that’s only a fraction of the 8 million trees that could potentially fall on its lines.
The risks are growing for utilities that don’t have access to accurate, real-time and predictive vegetation data at scale. That’s the problem Overstory is solving. Trees and plants are critical to helping us both mitigate and adapt to climate change. So we’ve made it our mission to equip businesses around the globe with the tools to make smarter decisions relating to vegetation.
The funding will allow us to double down on our core strength of using machine learning on satellite data. We’re obsessed with accuracy down to the tree level, whether that’s tracking bark beetle outbreaks in Sweden or identifying 37 different species of vegetation in Spain. The Overstory platform identifies the location, height, health and species of trees. It then alerts customers to where the riskiest trees are — the ones that need to be cut down or pruned immediately because they are at risk of growing into or falling onto the power lines.
Satellite view of California fires. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing number of power outages and wildfires caused by climate change. We’re proud to invest in Overstory, which provides businesses with greater visibility, risk analysis, and optimization recommendations for vegetation management.”
We couldn’t be more excited about the team of investors who are joining us on this journey through this investment round. In addition to Moxxie and CapitalT, we are adding a stellar list of new investors including Omidyar Technology Ventures, Toba Capital, Overwater Ventures and Climate Capital. A number of angel investors are joining including Mark Tercek (former CEO, The Nature Conservancy), Bill Clerico (former CEO & Co-Founder, WePay), Justin Stevens (Senior Partner, Apollo), Shomik Dutta (Co-Founder & General Partner, Higher Ground Labs), Alex Roetter (Managing Director & General Partner, Moxxie Ventures and former SVP Engineering, Twitter) and Ilya Volodarsky (Co-Founder, Segment). We’re thrilled to have our existing investors Pale Blue Dot, MCJ Collective, Powerhouse and Futuristic.vc also participating.
The investors, which span the globe from Silicon Valley to Amsterdam, bring expertise in climate impact, SaaS businesses, machine learning, energy policy, utilities, enterprise sales and building global brands. We’re proud to have female founders Katie Jacobs Stanton, Janneke Niessen and Eva De Mol as leads — and 73% of the round is from female-led funds or women partners.
We’ll also use the funding to expand our sales operation in the United States, where we’ve signed several new utility customers in the last few months, including Delaware Electric Cooperative, Holy Cross Energy and Sho-Me Power Electric Coop. The U.S. expansion comes on top of a base of big European utilities with a market cap of €28.7 billion including Red Eléctrica de España and EDP.
“We are very bullish about the problem that Overstory is tackling and believe the Overstory team is perfectly suited to do this. They are hands down one of the smartest teams in this space.”
Our company is based in Amsterdam but we work remotely, with people living all over Western Europe and in the U.S. We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the six people on our leadership team are female or non-white males, 38% of the overall team identifies as female and 25% of the team are people of color. Eight nationalities are represented in our team of 17, and we speak eight languages: English, Dutch, French, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Cantonese and Russian.
The investment and expansion means we’re looking for people to join the fabulous Overstory team. Come help us prevent wildfires, reduce carbon emissions and protect biodiversity. Let’s do this!
