Three years after spinning out of sustainable apparel brand Tentree, Vancouver-based cleantech startup Veritree has surpassed 100 million trees pledged through its platform and announced $9.1 million CAD ($6.5 million USD) in Series A funding.
Veritree plans to build on that growth by rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring and analysis features, developing integrations to enhance auditing and accessibility, and moving into new ecosystems across South America and Asia.
The nature restoration tech company also aims to help its corporate clients plant one billion trees by 2030.
Veritree aims to help companies execute restoration projects “in a way that isn’t just a tax on the business.”
“[Nature] restoration needs to scale, and we need to bring funding into the space,” Tentree co-founder and Veritree co-founder and CEO Derrick Emsley told BetaKit in an interview. “And the reason it is consistently lagging so far behind other initiatives is because of the lack of transparency, reporting … ongoing monitoring, [and] verification.”
Emsley and the team behind Tentree—the Vancouver clothing brand known for planting 10 trees for every item purchased—began building Veritree in 2019 as an in-house tool to address this exact problem and manage its growing portfolio of tree-planting projects. The goal was to collect and verify on-site data and create software to streamline and display that information.
Following some early interest from Samsung in 2022, Tentree realized that its software could benefit other businesses and decided to spin it out as a standalone company, securing some initial funding from a group including Kitchener-Waterloo’s Garage Capital, Vancouver-based Lyra Growth Partners, Regina’s Broad Street Bulls, and Toronto-based Northside Ventures.
Veritree’s latest, all-equity Series A round closed in late 2024. It was led by Vancouver’s Pender Ventures, with support from fellow new investor, Montréal-based Diagram’s ClimateTech Fund, and existing backers Garage and Northside. This brings Veritree’s total funding to more than $15.4 million CAD ($11 million USD).
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Emsley indicated that it was an up round that included some secondary capital for non-active shareholders dating back to its spin out from Tentree, but declined to disclose Veritree’s valuation, how much secondary was involved, or who was bought out.
“There was a small amount of cap table cleanup that needed to take place, but it was insignificant,” he claimed.
Veritree currently focuses on five types of nature restoration: agroforestry—which entails planting fruit trees to support food security—kelp seaforestation, mangrove, post-wildfire recovery, and terrestrial or general reforestation projects across Canada, the United States (US), and around the world.
“Veritree is solving one of climate tech’s biggest blind spots—trust in nature-based solutions,” Pender partner Isaac Souweine, who has joined Veritree’s board, said in a statement. “Its platform brings accountability to a space that’s long needed it, and they’ve assembled an exceptional team to scale the business. We see Veritree not only as a category leader but as the foundation for a more reliable and scalable nature economy.”
Under the leadership of US President Donald Trump, backlash towards environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies has grown. The impact of this shift has affected Canadian firms, but Emsley claimed Veritree has been unscathed thus far.
“What we’ve seen, fortunately, is that demand for work in [nature] restoration and things like that has continued to be relatively strong, despite some of the public messaging around it,” Emsley said, noting that Veritree’s customers “continue to really see value in this.”
A recent survey of Canadian institutional investors indicates that they are still committed to curbing climate change, but have become less comfortable speaking publicly about it.
Emsley acknowledged that amid the ESG backlash, the dialogue surrounding carbon and climate impact initiatives has become more politically charged. However, the CEO argued that this is less true for the conversation around trees and the need to preserve and restore natural ecosystems, thanks to readily apparent problems like mass deforestation and wildfires.
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“Every single summer, it’s in our face more and more,” he said.
Veritree aims to help corporate clients execute restoration projects “in a way that isn’t just a tax on the business,” but creates value by enabling them to meet their ESG goals, improve customer acquisition, engagement, or retention, or increase brand resonance, Emsley said.
When it comes to nature and restoration and how that embeds within a brand, Emsley argued that there is “a ton of opportunity” for companies to both make a large impact and drive meaningful business.
“That’s how we really believe this continues to scale as well.”
Feature image courtesy Veritree.