UK-based Pivotal secures €5.1M for its large-scale biodiversity measuring technology

Cambridge-based Pivotal, a biodiversity data company that offers consumers and businesses information about investments that will benefit nature, announced on Wednesday that it has raised £4.5M (approximately €5.11M) in a Seed round of funding.

According to Pivotal, the funding will help reinvent the economics of tracking biodiversity and create a platform to measure biodiversity at scale.

Investors supporting this round

The round was led by London-based Octopus Ventures, a venture capital investor in the UK and Europe. AENU, The Clearing Ventures, and existing investor Pale Blue Dot also joined the round.

Octopus Ventures invests £200M annually and manages £1.9B for institutional and individual investors. It is part of Octopus Group, a group of entrepreneurial businesses whose common goal is to back the people, ideas and industries that will change the world.

Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven, investor, B2B software at Octopus Ventures, says, “Pivotal’s model is positioning them to become the vital data source for biodiversity restoration and the catalyst for a range of new ways to understand, improve and link financial rewards to biodiversity.”

Biodiversity matters

With the use of a network of human taxonomic specialists, AI, sensors, satellites, and drones, Pivotal has developed and annotated species-level biodiversity data and analytics that are accurate, quantified, and auditable.

“Our approach is affordable as well as scalable. We capture biodiversity data on the ground using a range of technologies. All the data we collect is organised and analysed first with machine learning, then quality-checked by ecosystem experts,” says the company.

Pivotal claims to cut the cost of documenting site-level change by as much as 98 per cent and allow as few as 1500 workers to annually assess 100 million hectares or 5 per cent of the world’s degraded land.

The company’s database and platform claim to enable greater transparency for businesses and regulators, allow ecological improvement to be linked to sizable financial incentives, and support the development of new sustainability-related markets.

The UK-based company also makes it possible for the financial incentive systems for the restoration of nature to undergo transformation. 

Instead of funding projects, Pivotal enables businesses and investors to fund tangible, quantifiable results that benefit nature, allowing money to go where it will have the biggest positive effects. By lowering the expense of measuring change over time, on the ground, funding can be connected to outcomes.

Zoe Balmforth, co-founder of Pivotal, says, “Biodiversity has become an increasing priority for everyone from business to government, and organisations are setting out ambitious plans to help slow and reverse biodiversity loss.”

“However, these ambitions are impeded by the challenge of knowing what’s really happening on the ground. Companies struggle to track their supply chains, and governments and regulators lack the data to enforce regulation and effectively pursue biodiversity goals like the UN’s 30 by 30.”

“With affordable, scalable analytics of species-level data, we can better incentivise and track change in biodiversity over time, and open up new, impactful and secure mechanisms of investment,” adds Balmforth.

Improvement in the carbon credit markets

According to Pivotal, the biodiversity progress will also make it possible to link carbon credit markets to actual advancements and provide the groundwork for the emerging biodiversity credit market.

Financial institutions with over €18T in AUM have pledged to protect against biodiversity loss. But companies investing in carbon credits and the burgeoning biodiversity credit market struggle to ensure that the projects producing those credits are supported by proof of actual, measurable results.

With Pivotal’s platform, credit project owners and purchasers can both track changes in biodiversity over time and connect a credit’s worth to actual, quantified gains. 

This capacity will make it possible to inexpensively attach significant financial incentives to tangible evidence of results.

Co-founder Cameron Frayling says, “Today, businesses buy carbon credits based on projects like the planting of new trees in a depleted area in the expectation that it will deliver a positive outcome for nature. My question is, if you’re not measuring outcomes, how do you know?”

“There is a profound misalignment of incentives and expectations in the nature space. By focussing on incentivising real, measured outcomes, we can increase the effectiveness of investment into nature and biodiversity – an area the world is rapidly realising is fundamental to human quality of life and to our global economy.”

A new Chief Technology Officer

Pivotal was founded in 2022 by Cameron Frayling, an experienced founder of life science businesses Lightcast and Biofidelity, and Zoe Balmforth, a former British Diplomat and a PhD in ecology who has spent 25 years working on biodiversity issues assisting businesses in developing their environmental strategy and goals.

Last month, the company announced the appointment of Dr Ben Tregenna as its Chief Technology Officer. From his work at Evi Technologies, which developed the technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, before he joined the UN Environment Programme, Tregenna has startup and AI knowledge.

That knowledge is combined with expertise in biodiversity data and platforms acquired while directing the UNEP-WCMC team that created tools like ENCORE and IBAT to help the commercial sector achieve its conservation goals.

Tregenna says, “It’s exciting to see how site-based biodiversity data and analytics can be combined with outcome-based investment mechanisms. Investment into outcomes, rather than projects, could profoundly change the incentive structures on the ground and the economics of the restoration of nature.”