Finnish company assesses forest carbon sinks and storm damage with an AI-powered platform – growth funding provided by the Ehrnrooths
CollectiveCrunch, the company in the business of automating forestry analytics, collected €2.3M of new funding from the Ehrnrooths’ investment company and the existing owners. The company has already acquired large customers, including Metsähallitus, Tornator and LocalTapiola.
This article was written by journalist Saara Niskanen and originally published in Finnish in the newspaper Talouselämä on 31 August 2021.
The AI-powered SaaS platform developed by the Finnish company CollectiveCrunch can estimate tree volumes in forests without a need for physical visits, which can help for instance to mitigate the impacts of climate change around the world.
“The Linda Forest platform knows what’s in the forest, usually as accurately as can be known by making ground visits,” says CPO Jarkko Lipponen.
The platform utilises satellite imagery from different years, climate data, LIDAR data for forests as well as CollectiveCrunch’s own AI-based algorithm and forecasts. It can estimate how many and what kind of trees there are in the forest, how to schedule felling and how much damage has been caused by a storm, among other things.
The company is currently developing a system for monitoring forests as carbon sinks, aiming to implement it globally.
Measuring carbon sinks is one of the most important focus areas in terms of growth for Linda Forest, since the volume of climate change mitigation measures is accelerating globally.
“We believe that it is an area where we will significantly expand in the next few years,” Lipponen says.
Recently, Swedish company Nidoco, owned by Alexander and Albert Ehrnrooth’s investment company Virala Group joined in backing CollectiveCrunch’s growth. Together with the previous owners of CollectiveCrunch, such as Thominvest and private investors, Nidoco led a finance round of EUR 2.3 million, which was completed in the summer.
In addition, CollectiveCrunch has been selected for Business Finland’s Young Innovative Company funding programme, through which the company as much as over EUR 1 million in additional funding. As part of the programme, CollectiveCrunch will explore markets in North and South America as well as Asia.
CollectiveCrunch’s turnover exceeded €1 million last year, and strong growth is expected this year as well. The operating result was affected by investments for growth, showing a slight loss.
In 2016, Jarkko Lipponen founded the company with Rolf Schmitz from Germany and Christof Danzl from Austria.
LocalTapiola tests the assessment of storm damage
Other tools for analysing forests are available in Finland and elsewhere in the world, but according to Lipponen, they do not contain such a broad variety of data and are therefore less accurate.
“Our AI-based forest inventory tool is one of its kind in the world, especially when it comes to accuracy, the scale of the areas covered and the frequency of upgrades to the models.”
CollectiveCrunch’s position in the market is strengthened by the fact that it has already acquired large customers in Finland and the neighbouring countries.
In Finland, Linda Forest is used by the state-owned forest administration Metsähallitus, the largest commercial forest owner Tornator and the insurance company LocalTapiola, for example. In Sweden and Estonia, the customers include operators responsible for forest administrations in these countries.
In Finland, Metsähallitus owns millions of hectares of forest. “By using our forest inventory system, they have been able to reduce the number of forest visits, with very positive results.”
Reducing the number of ground visits saves costs and time in forest management.
In the summer, CollectiveCrunch started an experiment with LocalTapiola to assess the damage caused by storms to forests.
“The project has got off to a good start. We are now preparing and collecting data and building a model, with results expected during the first quarter of next year”.
CollectiveCrunch
What it does: Develops the AI-based forest analytics solution Linda Forest
Founded: 2016
Founders: Jarkko Lipponen, Rolf Schmitz and Christof Danzl
Employees: 20
Turnover: EUR 1.1 million (2020)
Operating result: EUR -124,000 (2020)
Owners: Nidoco AB, Thominvest Oy, Markko Vaarnas, Gorilla Ventures Oy, the co-founders and private investors from Finland, Germany, England and South Korea
