Y Combinator invests in Pina Earth

The investor has invested 500,000 US dollars in the climate company as part of a pre-seed round.

The technology investor Y Combinator from Silicon Valley has invested 500,000 US dollars in the climate tech start-up Pina Earth. Pina Earth is developing an online platform to certify the carbon storage of forests. It is intended to bring forest owners together with buyers of CO2 certificates. The investment was made as part of a pre-seed round.

The company now wants to invest the money in its product development and filling "key roles in the team". The start-up is currently running several pilot projects in Germany. Based on these, Pina Earth wants to expand its activities to forests throughout the EU.

"Forest inventories are often still carried out very manually - by measuring individual trees with a tape measure. In addition, there are hundreds of pages of documents that are required for the certification of a CO2 project," explains co-founder and CEO Gesa Biermann. It is now time for new methods: "remote sensing, AI-based data analysis and process digitization". The start-up wants to ensure that these are used to increase the speed and quality of CO2 certificates from forest projects. Gustaf Alströmer, Partner at Y Combinator, thinks highly of the investment: "We were impressed by the founders of Pina Earth and the technology they have developed in a short space of time."

Y Combinator has already invested in 3,000 start-ups. Pina Earth is now one of 20 German start-ups that have been funded since 2005. Other companies in which Y Combinator has invested include Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit. Alumni of the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM) founded Pina Earth last year. The CDTM is an interdisciplinary educational institution of LMU and TU Munich.