The Landbanking Group, a climate-focused fintech company headquartered in Munich, has disclosed a successful funding round of €10.4 million in seed investment. The funding was spearheaded by High Impact Fund BonVenture alongside Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist André Hoffmann.
The corporation has also revealed the introduction of Landler, a platform designed for the management and investment in natural assets such as biodiversity, carbon, soil, and water.
Assisting Landler with their respective expertise in marketing, ReFi, and impact measurement are venture capital funds 4P Capital, Vanagon, and Planet A.
Supporting the company’s development are The SUN Institute of the Deutsche Post Foundation, as well as ten individuals and families, including Prince Maximilian of Liechtenstein, Alexa Firmenich, Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck, and Fabian Strüngmann.
Dr. Erwin Stahl, Managing Partner at BonVenture, expressed, “As a High Impact Investment Fund, we recognize nature and biodiversity as vital for our collective future. The Landbanking Group has pioneered a market-innovating platform to monitor nature in a reliable and transparent manner. Through our investment, we aim to be part of this exciting journey right from the outset.”
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Leading the Path for Managing Natural Assets
In 2022, Sonja and Martin Stuchtey established The Landbanking Group with the goal of promoting a new asset class known as “Nature Equity.” This innovative class redirects land-use incentives towards practices that benefit nature, distinguishing itself from other asset categories.
Before this venture, Sonja delved into technology investment, supporting educational initiative ScienceLab, along with pro-democracy platforms like Alliance4Europe and Disarm. Meanwhile, Martin, previously a Senior and Managing Partner at McKinsey & Co., specialized in leading global sustainability practices and later co-founded SYSTEMIQ, a company dedicated to effecting systemic change.
Their inspiration to create The Landbanking Group stemmed from their firsthand involvement in managing an organic family farm in Austria. Through this experience, they witnessed the gradual degradation of the surrounding land due to unsustainable land-use practices.
This realization motivated them to prioritize the proper stewardship of natural capital—comprising both renewable and non-renewable environmental resources—to avert its decline resulting from unsustainable economic activities and environmental disasters.
Natural Capital Management Hub: A Holistic Platform
The fresh investment secured from investors is poised to propel The Landbanking Group towards broadening its customer base within the agri-food industry and exploring new markets in infrastructure, energy, and financial services.
This injection of funds will empower Landler to expand its repertoire of monitoring models across various biomes and ecosystem categories. It will also facilitate the preservation of managed agricultural and urban lands.
In practical terms, Landler integrates earth observation, digital in-situ data, machine learning, and decentralized ledger technology to evaluate every corner of the planet and establish a “natural capital account” for it. This account serves as the foundation for generating “nature equity assets.”
These assets possess balance-sheet quality and are appealing to companies in the agri-food, energy, resource, or infrastructure sectors, as well as to insurance providers and financial institutions.
Landler employs a combination of local sampling data, Earth observation satellite data, machine learning, and biophysical process modeling. Supplementary resources such as weather records are vital in enabling The Landbanking Group to offer scalable, independent, and cost-effective MRV (Measurable, Reportable, and Verifiable) services.
