A group of four University of Pennsylvania alumni raised a $4.8 million seed round for their startup Treeswift, which gathers forest data using drones.
The funding was led by San Francisco-based Pathbreaker Ventures along with 13 other investors, bringing the startup's total funding to $6.4 million since it was founded in March 2020.
Treeswift uses drones and robotics to accelerate the process of gathering tree measurements and other environmental data on forests. It then sells that data to companies like forest landowners and firms with environmental and sustainability interests. Treeswift's services are used in areas like carbon volume measurements, timber value appraisal, deforestation monitoring and wildfire mitigation.
CEO Steven Chen, who co-founded the company along with Elizabeth Hunter, Michael Shomin and Vaibhav Arcot, said the majority of the funding will go toward building out both the operational and the technical teams at Treeswift. Many of the members of the technical team are roboticists and machine-learning experts from Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. Chen also wants to bring on experts in the forest industry to help "put a face to the data to show companies how they can use this data and utilize it in the best possible way."
The Treeswift team currently consists of 18 full-time employees, with another 10 part-time members of the team. The startup works out of the Pennovation Center, Penn's business incubator and laboratory space at 3401 Grays Ferry Ave. Although Chen didn't put a number on how many hires he wants to bring on with the seed funding, he said that the team is looking to add members in field operations, like drone pilots.
Forest measurements have traditionally been gathered by a timber cruiser, a person who manually measures the circumference and height of trees, with data also gathered from far above using satellite and airplanes. Treeswift's Swiftcruise product flies below the canopy of a forest and uses sensors to gather data at 10 times the speed of a timber cruiser.
"Our big vision is we want to build out this technology so that you can survey the planet as frequently and as accurately as verifiably possible," Chen said. "We really see this data being real critical for a lot of current existing companies [and] new companies as they're trying to tackle these big problems in natural resources. Whether it is for more effective, sustainable timber management, whether it's for agriculture, carbon, wildfires, just really showing them that beyond just using satellite data, it's possible to get this under-canopy."
Chen said that Treeswift doesn't have many competitors right now. There are other startups studying the role of forests in issues like climate change and wildfires, but the Treeswift team views them as partners in fighting these problems.
"I think climate change, sustainability, natural resource management is such a large problem you need many, many groups working on it," Chen said. "And so we've been really focused on creating the best possible data, really that foundation, and providing and enabling other groups who are working on other parts of the pipeline, other problems, to utilize that so that they can do their job much better."
Treeswift has caught the attention of investors from coast to coast, Chen said. The founder anticipates future support from the venture community and hopes to unlock more capital rounds as the company develops.
