SAN FRANCISCO — Vibrant Planet, the creator of the OS for forest restoration, has launched with a $17 million seed round led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund, The Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, with participation from Valia Ventures, Earthshot Ventures (a venture fund backed by Emerson Collective, John Doerr, Tom Steyer, Microsoft and others), Elemental Excelerator, Cisco, Day One Ventures and Halogen Ventures. Angel investors include two of Silicon Valley’s top platform builders: Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Netflix’s former Chief Product Officer and current Vibrant Planet CPO, Neil Hunt. The new funding will enable Vibrant Planet to grow its team with strategic new hires and expand its platform to restore forest resilience across the Western U.S., Europe, and other at-risk forests worldwide.
Vibrant Planet is the first operating system that provides organizations, state and federal agencies, and land managers with a comprehensive platform for forest treatment planning, decision support, monitoring and reporting, and investment prioritization. This technology allows multiple stakeholders to collaboratively plan forest health treatments in months rather than years while staying within a target budget and qualifying projects for carbon financing from companies with net zero goals.
While public sector funding to support wildfire risk reduction and forest restoration is rising, there is no existing infrastructure to help prioritize where and how efforts should be used to maximize impact. With Vibrant Planet, land owners and natural resource managers, organizations, and administrations can:
- Create forest treatment scenarios in real-time, using AI-generated tree-and-house-level data
- Prioritize where and how funding should be used to minimize risk and maximize carbon, water, and biodiversity benefits
- Develop comprehensive treatment plans in collaboration with stakeholders
- Monitor/report on landscape conditions and restoration progress
- Adapt strategies and tactics based on monitoring insights
- Develop verified fire-adapted forest carbon projects that help companies achieve net zero goals
In California alone, 6.5 million of its 33 million forested acres burned over the last two fire seasons. More than 1.3 million acres of California’s forests experienced high severity burning that killed all or most aboveground biomass. For these landscapes, forests may take decades to centuries to recover, if they ever do. To mitigate the impacts of worsening wildfires, rapid and large-scale implementation of targeted forest management is needed to secure forest health and protect surrounding communities.
Vibrant Planet is a public benefit corporation.
