2022: The year of Earthshot

Updates from an incredible year, and a look ahead for Earthshot Labs

2022: The year of Earthshot

What a year!

Earthshot has grown from a fledgling community into a rapidly scaling organization in service of the planet. We started 2021 with an impromptu Slack channel of our ecologically conscious friends to explore how we could contribute to global restoration. The momentum and viral growth of the community opened us to the realization that this was a massive idea whose time had come: the scientific, technological, financial, and operational infrastructure were all coming together to incentivize ecological restoration at a planetary scale.

Some big milestones for Earthshot in 2021:

• $7m seed round: Future Ventures (Maryanna Saenko & Steve Jurvestson) took the lead, with participation from Kilowatt Capital, Global Green Capital, Parameter Ventures, Trailhead Capital, Tenzin Capital, Tom Chi (At One Ventures) and more. We are honored to be assembling the dream team of shareholders committed to ecological restoration and creating a beautiful future for humanity. Working with these visionary investors was a deeply relational process to form lifelong partnerships in service of the planet. Each of them sees the same unfolding future as we do, and we’re excited to be on a journey together.

• Earthshot Institute: Earthshot Institute is the realization of our vision for truly open source ecological research, citizen science, and multidisciplinary partnerships with academia, governments, and ecologically minded companies. In June we were awarded an NSF grant to conduct open-source ecological research, which began the process to create the institute as an independent non-profit. The incredible Aaron Hirsh is the first executive director of the institute, and we’re so excited to have found such a profoundly brilliant and soulful leader for this new facet of the Earthshot movement. 

• Hiring! Since raising our seed round we have been very focused on hiring and are rapidly approaching 20 world-class team members. The level of coherence and genius within the team is truly a dream come true! We have more than 10 positions open, mostly for full-stack software engineers and data science/machine learning experts. We would love to hear from you, or get referrals to your brilliant friends: https://earthshot.eco/work-with-us 

• Science and Product: LandOS is a massive idea: a comprehensive global ecological simulator plus a pathway for land stewards to easily earn money from land restoration and conservation. Our engineering teams have built prototypes of both the LandOS and Biome products that are approaching the field testing stage. The teams have already delivered ground breaking machine learning-based computer vision to measure and classify trees quickly and easily on a smartphone, and are working on global ecological simulation and carbon forecasting to automate the carbon project development process.

Some gifts: Our seminal podcast with Jyoti Ma of the Fountain, and an upcoming seminar on January 26th on the future of neural networks for ecological simulation.

2021 was the year that the world woke up to the climate crisis and committed financial, political, and cultural will to address it at scale. 2022 is going to be the year when we design and implement new technical, financial, and social systems to channel that will into practical change and begin the transformation of how humans relate with the rest of nature on our planet.

Earthshot embraces a profoundly holistic approach toward land restoration, not just as a functional intervention for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but to address all the other ways in which humanity has been impacting the rest of nature. We want to honor our sacred relationship as a creative keystone species on the planet and restore multigenerational conscious land stewardship and regenerative livelihoods.

Ten years from now, what would need to be true in order to celebrate humanity’s successful ecological reintegration and climate rebalancing? The Earthshot team is dedicated to making this possibility into reality. If you share our vision for the global transformation of humanity’s relationship with land and nature, we would love to hear from you, and work together to mobilize an unprecedented scale of resources, talent, love, and time in service of this mission.

With love and deepest appreciation,

Troy, Patrick and the Earthshot Team