HELSINKI, Finland — Forestry tech company CollectiveCrunch has announced the closure of a 600K€ funding round led by Finland’s Thominvest, taking the company’s total funding to 1M€. Existing and new angel investors also participated to complete the round. Collective Crunch will use the funds to finalize and launch the first commercial version of its Linda Forest platform in the second half of 2019.
With its long history in forestry, Thominvest has a solid understanding of the value CollectiveCrunch brings to this market. The firm’s state-of-the-art AI-supported technologies help landowners to more accurately assess and manage their forestry inventory and buyers of wood resources to target the wood they actually need.
“We are following developments in AI closely and have been aware of CollectiveCrunch since 2017,” said Thominvest Group’s Mats Söderström. “CollectiveCrunch is focused on the forestry industry and we were convinced by the team’s capabilities and the commercial progress they have made in the last quarter,” he concluded.
CollectiveCrunch’s Linda Forest AI platform utilizes climate, geo, and customer process data to arrive at better predictions of forest inventory. The solution lets foresters know the volumes and species of wood they have on their land without having to drive out for inspection. Traditional solutions are cumbersome, time-consuming, expensive, and may have error rates of up to 30%.
“The funds raised in this round are essential in building the team and technical capabilities to fulfill our ambition of becoming a global leader in AI for the forestry industry,” said CollectiveCrunch CEO Rolf Schmitz. “We thank our existing and new investors for their support and faith in our vision,” he concluded.
The closure of this latest 600K€ round brings the company’s total funding since inception to 1M€.
The round closure follows a recently announced a multi-year partnership with Finland’s Metsähallitus Forestry Ltd. that aims to improve harvesting and forest development planning. The company has offices in Helsinki, Berlin, and Munich, and forestry customers in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Brazil.