When we look at most industries, whether car manufacturing, food production, or healthcare, we are using technologies like software, artificial intelligence, and automation to scale up and speed up what we build. The “why” to what we build is provided by the engineers, doctors, scientists, and stakeholders who we build for. Our natural world is no different. We should be applying our great technologies to the why of creating a sustainable ecosystem for ourselves and future generations.

Dendra is building the technologies and tools needed for global ecosystem restoration, grounded in decades of ecological research and fieldwork.

We do so recognizing both the environmental needs of our lives and the economic impacts of climate change. Applying data science, artificial intelligence, and drone automation to environmental management improves decision making across the board–from scaling land rehabilitation work to compliance with regulation to accurate asset valuation, accounting for the carbon that is actually removed from the atmosphere instead of buying a paper promise to do so.

The challenges facing our natural ecosystems are not simple. It’s not a monoculture. It’s not all growing at the same rate. It’s facing different pressures, both wild and human induced.

In the case of land undergoing early rehabilitation work, weed invasion is a real challenge. If it goes unchecked, weeds can take over the land and you have to start again at enormous cost in money and lost years of work.

As that ecosystem matures, you have to make sure the right wildlife is coming back. Birds and mammals are often the hard workers enriching the biodiversity of the community. When things are out of balance, new feral animals invade which has to be controlled quickly before the scales are tipped forever.

By introducing the ability to scale surveying the land and accurately identifying each plant and each animal across it, Dendra provides a clear picture of the state of the land.

By applying ecologically-trained AI to that data, we can understand how each aspect of the ecosystem is trending and identify early risks like erosion and invasive species before they derail restoration work. We turn data about the land into insight about the ecosystem.

By providing automation to plug that insight into, we can supercharge interventions and restore ecosystems ranging from a single industrial site to entire forests and more. Aerial seeding from drones, gives you that super power.

This is our moon shot.

After being put to use on 38 projects across 11 countries, Dendra’s technologies are maturing rapidly. What comes next is scaling our work to more projects, more sites, more industries, and more stakeholders. No matter how large the land, or how many species need to be brought back into balance, we aim to make it so.

This is our challenge. And this is our opportunity. We’ve just raised our $10 million Series A led by At One Ventures, and co-led by Airbus Ventures, with participation from other investors such as Future Positive Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Lionheart Ventures and Systemiq. Read more about it here!

Join us! If you think you’ve got what it takes to transform and build systems for our natural world reach out to jobs@dendra.io.