veritree, a platform focused on verified nature restoration, announced it has reached a landmark milestone of 100 million trees pledged across its global projects, from Kenya to the U.S. to Canada. The news comes along with a $6.5 million Series A financing round led by Pender Ventures, with participation from Garage Capital, Northside Ventures, and Diagram Ventures.
Having grown about 450% in just two years, veritree will use the capital to advance the rollout of its AI monitoring and analysis features, test and deploy the platform across new ecosystems in South America and Asia, accelerate their current go-to-market success, and build additional integrations to enhance auditing, strengthen monitoring, and improve platform accessibility.
Created as the “Restorative Operating System,” veritree is grounded in the experience of planting and verifying over 55 million trees to date in ecosystems worldwide. Each tree planted has contributed to building and refining a restoration platform that supports the full lifecycle of nature-based projects, from design to delivery to data collection and management.
With a combination of on-the-ground monitoring, sensor deployment, and above-ground GIS tools, this platform captures verified, site-level data across its projects and transforms it into high-quality, standards-ready reporting. And recent innovations added to veritree’s proprietary Smart Forest Design to deepen the qualitative and quantitative reporting standards include:
1.) AI-Backed Bioacoustic Monitors utilize dual microphones to capture the sounds of bird species. And these bioacoustic monitors track bird populations and behaviours, andare a key indicator of ecological health and restoration success due to their sensitivity to environmental changes.
2.) A Social Impact Dashboard quantifies the real-world impact of restoration projects on local communities, recognizing that environmental restoration can go hand in hand with social empowerment. With tailored surveys, veritree quantifies the impacts of restoration projects on communities, including job creation, gender equity, and access to food, water, education, health insurance, and financial services.
3.) The Collect App enables tree planting partners to collect data and evidence throughout a project’s lifecycle via a mobile phone. Unlike other apps in the space, it sends users guidance on what data to collect to provide the highest-quality reporting.
In 2022, veritree was created out of its sister company tentree, a sustainable apparel brand that plants trees for every product sold. When tentree founders began to question their ability to stand behind the impact they were claiming, Derrick Emsley, Stephen Emsley, and David Luba built a system to track and confirm the trees that were being planted. What started as a brand safeguard gained traction after Samsung licensed the software and mentioned it in a press release, unleashing a wave of interest and setting the foundation for veritree as a standalone company.
Since 2023, veritree reached 100 million trees pledged, a milestone that took tentree a decade to hit. And now veritree is helping nearly 300 companies embed verified restoration into their business models.
KEY QUOTES:
“veritree is solving one of climate tech’s biggest blind spots—trust in nature-based solutions. 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.”
Isaac Souweine, Partner at Pender Ventures
“Data integrity in reporting is critical for nature-based solutions to scale. While corporate investments in nature are on the rise, many lack the technology to confirm and authenticate the impact they are making — and that’s where veritree comes in. veritree exists to fill a crucial gap in the nature tech space — streamlining project management and data collection while connecting restoration inputs, like trees and kelp, to measurable outcomes such as carbon, biodiversity, and community impact. It’s this rigorous proof, transparent monitoring capabilities, and reporting that is creating a flywheel that fuels more funding towards much-needed global restoration efforts.”
Derrick Emsley, CEO and co-founder of veritree
“At Hopper, we’re driven by a vision of travel that’s not just accessible but also conscious. veritree’s platform has allowed us to turn that vision into reality by bringing a new layer of transparency to our reforestation efforts. Through our collaboration, we’re not only connecting people with destinations but also with the planet through measurable and meaningful reforestation.”
Hopper’s Lead Economist Hayley Berg
