Ep 29: Merit Valdsalu
on Climate Tech opportunities, raising $7.9M to tokenize world’s forests and lessons learned in Pipedrive
Merit Valdsalu is the Co-founder and CEO of Single.Earth, a revolutionary blockchain-based ecosystem of earth’s carbon sequestration and biodiversity monitoring, tokenization, and trade. Before starting this highly ambitious project, Merit led localization efforts at the Estonian unicorn Pipedrive. Single.Earth was founded in 2019 and recently raised a $7.9M seed funding lead by EQT Ventures.
In this fascinating conversation, we talk about the need to digitize the earth’s nature and create a transparent, reliable, and efficient marketplace for trading carbon credits. We also discuss the business potential of the ClimateTech industry, economic and other motivations for nature preservation as well as overall fundraising and entrepreneurship lessons from Merit’s career at Pipedrive and Single.Earth.
CLICK one of the links below to listen to the episode
The topics covered in this episode (with Timestamps)
🔈 [01:20] INTRODUCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF SINGLE.EARTH
Landowners only make money when natural resources are depleted
Pursuing a passion for the environment
Planning and implementing a global paradigm-shifting project
A digital twin of the earth’s nature in open source
Simplifying and opening the global voluntary carbon trade
Voluntary vs mandatory carbon markets
🔈 [17:10] ON BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC MODELS FOR NATURE PRESERVATION
Trust and verification provided by blockchain
Using investors to replace the insufficient demand for voluntary carbon credits
State of the project and token sale
Affordable cost of decreasing the carbon footprint
🔈 [27:20] ON CLIMATE TECH INDUSTRY AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
The opportunities for starting a cleantech company
General public attitudes towards nature and environment
Can Western societies even make a difference
Balancing emissions and nature sequestration
Who owns the land and owner engagement
No business models for preserving only for regenerating nature
🔈 [45:55] FUNDRAISING FOR A CLIMATE TECH PROJECT
The abundance of investors looking at sustainability projects
Not only impact investors, but also general big VCs hot for this market
What investors look for in impact businesses
Having a big name VC on your ticket
🔈 [56:50] OVERALL ENTREPRENEURSHIP LESSONS
Putting people first
Creating a culture of enjoying work
Access to talent
Mental health
Choosing the right investors
To reach out to Merit use: Linkedin
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
