Leveraging AI, sensors, satellites, and drones, along with a network of human taxonomic experts, Pivotal is able to produce and annotate species-level biodiversity data and analytics which are real, measured, and auditable. Pivotal can reduce the cost of evidencing site-level change by as much as 98% and could enable 100 million hectares - the equivalent of five percent of the world’s degraded land - to be assessed each year by as few as 1,500 people.

By making biodiversity tracking faster and cheaper through its unique species level database and platform, Pivotal will enable greater transparency for businesses and regulators, allow ecological improvement to be linked to large-scale financial incentives and could aid the growth of new sustainability-linked markets.

Pivotal was created to enable a fundamental change in the financial incentive structures for the restoration of nature. Rather than investing in projects, Pivotal makes it possible for companies and investors to invest in real, measured, positive outcomes for nature, and to allow investment to flow to where it is having the greatest positive impact. Reducing the cost of tracking change over time, on the ground, enables investment to be linked to outcomes.

Pivotal’s £4.5 million funding round was led by Octopus Ventures and joined by AENU, The Clearing Ventures, and existing investors, Pale Blue Dot. Pivotal is co-founded by Cameron Frayling, the experienced founder of life science businesses Lightcast and Biofidelity, and Zoe Balmforth, a former British Diplomat and ecology PhD who has spent 25 years working on biodiversity issues from leading complex biodiversity surveys around the world, to helping major corporations design their nature strategies and targets.

Pivotal has also hired Dr Ben Tregenna as Chief Technology Officer. Tregenna brings start-up and AI experience from his time at Evi Technologies, which created the technology powering Amazon’s Alexa. That experience is combined with expertise in biodiversity data and platforms, built while leading the team at UNEP-WCMC which developed tools such as ENCORE and IBAT to assist the private sector in meeting their conservation goals.

Zoe Balmforth, Co-Founder of Pivotal said: “Biodiversity has become an increasing priority for everyone from business to government, and organisations are setting out ambitious plans to help slow and reverse biodiversity loss. However, these ambitions are impeded by the challenge of knowing what’s really happening on the ground.

"Companies struggle to track their supply chains, and governments and regulators lack the data to enforce regulation and effectively pursue biodiversity goals like the UN’s 30 by 30. With affordable, scalable analytics of species-level data, we can better incentivise and track change in biodiversity over time, and open up new, impactful and secure mechanisms of investment.”

In addition, this unprecedented view of biodiversity progress will enable carbon credit markets to be linked to real-world improvement and provide foundations for the nascent biodiversity credit market.

Financial institutions with more than €18 trillion in assets under management have made commitments to protect against biodiversity loss but businesses investing in carbon credits and the burgeoning biodiversity credit market struggle to ensure the projects producing those credits are backed by evidence of real, measured outcomes.

Through Pivotal’s platform, both the owners of credit projects and the buyers of those credits can track changes in biodiversity over time and link the value of a credit to real, measured gains. This capability will enable large-scale financial incentives to be affordably linked to on-the-ground evidence of outcomes.

Co-Founder Cameron Frayling said: “Today, businesses buy carbon credits based on projects like the planting of new trees in a depleted area in the expectation that it will deliver a positive outcome for nature. My question is, if you’re not measuring outcomes, how do you know? There is a profound misalignment of incentives and expectations in the nature space.

By focussing on incentivising real, measured outcomes, we can increase the effectiveness of investment into nature and biodiversity – an area the world is rapidly realising is fundamental to human quality of life and to our global economy.”

Ben Tregenna, CTO added: “It’s exciting to see how site-based biodiversity data and analytics can be combined with outcome-based investment mechanisms. Investment into outcomes, rather than projects, could profoundly change the incentive structures on the ground and the economics of the restoration of nature."

Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven, investor, B2B software, Octopus Ventures commented: “Pivotal’s model is positioning them to become the vital data source for biodiversity restoration and the catalyst for a range of new ways to understand, improve and link financial rewards to biodiversity.”