Yard Stick PBC, a company specializing in soil carbon measurement technology, has announced the successful completion of its Series A funding round, securing $10.6 million in investment. The leading investor in this round is the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund, with significant contributions from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Pillar VC, as well as a diverse group of climate-conscious founders, angel investors, and family offices. This funding round has elevated Yard Stick’s total venture capital funding to over $16 million.
“Capturing soil carbon has a range of benefits, from the commercial gains farmers see in improved soil quality and more-resilient yield, to the climate benefits of sequestering atmospheric carbon in the ground,” said Chris Tolles, co-founder and CEO of Yard Stick. “Yard Stick is reducing the cost of measuring soil carbon by 70-90+ percent while improving analytical rigor compared to current measurement techniques. We’ve been working with the largest carbon soil programs in the world to test our solution with farmers and ranchers. With this funding, our company will move beyond ‘beta,’ and enter full commercial deployment.”
Yard Stick’s innovative soil carbon measurement solution incorporates both specialized hardware and software components:
- Yard Stick’s spectral hardware eliminates the need for labour-intensive processes like taking soil cores, collecting samples in bags, and conducting laboratory tests. Grounded in decades of soil science research, their cloud-connected handheld device can instantly measure soil organic carbon content down to a depth of one meter.
- Yard Stick’s stratification engine automatically categorizes project fields and generates statistically robust sample plans, meeting the intricate requirements of various soil carbon protocols.
- Yard Stick’s field data platform facilitates real-time data collection, ensuring the security, auditability, and immediate accessibility of project data for all relevant stakeholders. Users can access a dynamic dashboard displaying soil carbon measurement data, facilitating a quick assessment of project progress, quantification of carbon stocks and changes, and easy sharing of information with key stakeholders, including growers, ranchers, foresters, registries, verifiers, commodity buyers, brands, and corporate carbon buyers.
Yard Stick’s Series A funding announcement comes at a time of remarkable growth for the company. In the autumn of 2022, Yard Stick received $18 million in funding from the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, initiating soil carbon measurement projects in six different initiatives across numerous states, covering millions of acres. More recently, Verra revised VM0042, its flagship soil carbon protocol, to explicitly permit using Yard Stick’s VisNIR spectroscopy for soil carbon measurement in Verra projects. The company plans to present the performance data of its spectral probe at the Soil Science Society of America annual meeting in St. Louis in October and publish the results shortly thereafter.
