Y Combinator invests in Pina Earth

As part of a pre-seed round, the investor has put $500,000 into the climate company.

Silicon Valley technology investor Y Combinator has invested $500,000 in climate tech startup Pina Earth. Pina Earth is developing an online platform to certify the carbon storage of forests. It aims to connect forest owners with buyers of carbon credits. The investment took place as part of a pre-seed round.

The company now plans to put the money into its product development and filling "key roles in the team." In Germany, the startup has been running a few pilot projects so far. From these, Pina Earth plans to expand its activities to forests across the EU.

"Forest inventories are often still done very manually - by measuring individual trees with a tape measure. On top of that, there are hundreds of pages of documents required to certify a CO2 project," explains co-founder and CEO Gesa Biermann. She says it is now time for new methods: "remote sensing, AI-based data analysis and process digitization." The startup wants to see these 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:inside of Pina Earth and the technology they developed in a short time."

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