Nka.eco co-founders Johann Wah (President) and Lawrence Xiao (CEO)
Nika.eco, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create advanced climate models for determining carbon credit issuance, has announced closing an oversubscribed seed funding round.
Silverstrand Capital led this round. Timbul Ventures, DMV Investments, Orvel Ventures, and Ascend Network also participated.
The terms of the funding remain undisclosed.
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Founded by Johann Wah (President) and Lawrence Xiao (CEO), Nika.eco tracks forest carbon, conducts deep dives into geospatial data and analyses additionality, baseline, leakage and permanence data. Carbon project investors and developers can use this data to develop nature-based projects and reach their net zero goals.
“Most machine learning solutions in the market use locally based compute, which limits the model’s ability to scale, or they run very inefficiently on the cloud due to nonoptimal cloud architectures,” co-founder Wah told e27.
“Our proprietary geospatial machine learning infrastructure automatically configures optimal resources to ensure your model is scalable and built efficiently. This significantly increases the time it takes to complete and improves cost structures,” he explained.
Beyond carbon, Nika eco also plans to use the capital to launch its geospatial infrastructure technology as a standalone SaaS product, which can lower costs and technological barriers to developing other types of climate models.
Nika.eco claims its audit-grade models are used by leading financial institutions, including Carbon Growth Partners and major European Banks. The model’s results can also be configured for the audit process to monetise forestry assets through carbon credits.
“Traditional carbon models usually take anywhere from six to eight months to train and build by industry standard. Our infrastructure has been able to support customers to reduce the time to within a month,” Wah added.
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“Our vision is to redesign the geospatial and climate modelling space by making powerful geospatial machine learning infrastructure easy to use and accessible to all, starting in the carbon markets,” Wah noted.
As part of this funding round, Silverstrand Capital Impact Investment Manager Julianto Johanes has joined Nika.eco’s Board, while its Head of Impact Investments Patti Chu has joined as Strategic Advisor.
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Image Credit: Nika.eco.
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