The Finnish-German startup CollectiveCrunch has received €500K funding from the European Space Agency (ESA) to further develop its one-of-a-kind AI, Linda Forest, and bring its service to new markets. ESA will contribute 50% of the overall cost, as the total volume of the project is close to €1 million.
CollectiveCrunch, a forestry tech startup that we recently included in our list of 10 promising European forestry tech startups to watch in 2020, was founded in 2016. Probably one of the largest AI initiatives in this sector, CollectiveCrunch has the potential to become the “Google Maps” of the forestry industry, handling the forests in a much more sustainable and dynamic way. Its innovative AI platform, Linda Forest, was launched in 2019, and is a game changing turn-key SaaS solution that predicts wood mass, wood species and wood quality of target areas far more accurately than any existing conventional methods.
The recently raised funding will be used to further develop and pilot the Linda Forest platform for forest inventories and key aspects of forest planning, investment and management, bringing new AI-based tools to both buyers and sellers of wood and forest lands. The company already has several high-profile customers in Finland, Sweden and the Baltics and interest from Central Europe, Russia and North America.
“This project is a major step in our development of becoming the AI leader in forestry, bringing new features to market and expanding into new markets,” says Rolf Schmitz, CEO and co-founder of CollectiveCrunch.
“CollectiveCrunch’s solution Linda Forest will help the forest industry to optimize forest management and contributes to more efficient use of natural resources. The mix of data sources like satellite Earth observation data or airborne laser scan and the integration of harvester data for calibration will further assure the quality of this AI-based solution for forestry,” says Antje Vogel, Applications Engineer at ESA Business Applications.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
