‍Treefera: Enabling Transparency and Resilience in Global Supply Chains - By Patrick Norris and Radu Bozga

We’re thrilled to share that Notion has led Treefera’s $30m Series B funding round.

Over the past few years, we’ve spent a significant amount of time looking to identify a software provider capable of delivering accurate, scalable insights into on-the-ground activities within nature-based commodities. Achieving this level of precision not only resolves challenges in first-mile supply chain visibility but also opens the door to entirely new use cases within financial markets.

With Treefera, we found a company uniquely positioned to do just that. Our investment thesis is driven by the strong market opportunity, the exceptional team, and the company's proven market traction and product edge - more below.

A $900bn market hiding in plain sight

Treefera operates in the market for monitoring first-mile supply chains for nature-based commodities. This includes raw materials like coffee, cacao, cotton, palm oil, timber, beef, and dairy – anything that grows in the ground or walks on it. This is a massive part of the global trading system, estimated to be a $900bn opportunity. Understanding what happens on the ground has never been completely cracked to the full extent by software alone, and to date requires a combination of humans, software and third party consulting vendors. This is now changing: Treefera unlocks this market opportunity by delivering first-mile insights entirely through a software platform. 

The strategic "why now" is driven by several significant changes:

• Technological advancements: Recent improvements in foundational technology have radically lowered the cost of sophisticated systems. The quality and volume of public and private data tracking the Earth's surface have exploded, and the cost of satellite imagery has decreased dramatically. Lower compute costs have also enabled advances in AI, machine learning, and computer vision to map the first mile of the supply chain in a more granular and in-depth way remotely.
• Increasing volatility and risk: Global supply chains are experiencing huge volatility, particularly at the first mile. Approximately 60% of resilience and risk issues live at the first mile of supply chains. Previously, companies have had the least data and knowledge about this area.
• Regulatory and stakeholder pressure: There is a big driver and need for data around the first mile due to regulatory pressure and compliance requirements. Regulations like the upcoming EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), effective December 2025, will require companies to prove their products do not impact deforestation, with significant potential fines for non-compliance. Shareholder mandates and consumer demands also drive the need for transparency and traceability.

Treefera is a first mover in this evolving market, benefiting from these macro and corporate/governmental tailwinds.

The data fabric: Treefera's unfair advantage

At its core, Treefera is an AI-enabled data platform. The secret sauce and product edge lie in its proprietary data fabric. This fabric brings together a highly fragmented suite of data sources – everything from nature-related data (vegetation types, disease, growth) to property rights and ownership. Treefera synthesizes open-source, commercial, and private datasets into this proprietary framework.

Unlike data aggregators or resellers, Treefera does not sell raw data feeds. Instead, the company sells actionable insights generated by this data fabric, delivered through their platform interface or API. This allows customers to answer specific questions related to sourcing, risk, and compliance.

Key technological differentiators include:

• Data coverage, granularity, and accuracy: Unanimous customer feedback indicates that Treefera's data fabric covers more ground than competitors, at a fraction of the cost, and with higher accuracy. This is often better than having people on the ground, as Treefera can generate more accurate insights and refresh data continuously.
• Proprietary models and calibration: Treefera strategically acquired customers in its early days who possessed significant ground truth data. This proprietary data allowed them to validate and calibrate their models, which are not available to others. A key capability developed through this process is "pin-to-polygon," which allows Treefera to automatically derive boundaries and historical/forecasted data (like deforestation or plot changes) from a given GPS location.
• Speed and efficiency: Treefera can adjust its data pipelines quickly as regulations change. Their architecture, which is largely agentic and asynchronous, is designed to be extremely frugal on compute costs, contributing to high gross margins and creating a defensibility moat.
• Actionable data products: A key strength is the ability to serve up complex data insights as simple, actionable data products that make sense to business users, not just data scientists.

Strong market pull across a broad range of use cases

Treefera’s market pull is very significant, driven by the product edge. Customers appreciate the combination of their commercial setup, team, and most importantly, the product's data coverage, accuracy, breadth, and price point. 

Light house logos have adopted Treefera to cover a large part of their nature-based supply chain, usually in favour of having a manual ‘man on a horse’ approach, where people on the ground need to inspect fields and compile the data. 

We’ve been impressed by the global reach of the product, together with the diversity of the use cases the product serves (and how these will further compound in the future). 

Treefera has established a global footprint, serving customers across North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Their platform caters to enterprises active in the Energy, Forestry, Regenerative Agriculture & Carbon, CPG, and Healthcare sectors. 

Current applications include carbon monitoring for FMCG supply chains, boosting assurance for carbon credits (where higher assurance directly increases revenue per hectare), and ensuring compliance with EUDR regulations by enabling nature monitoring and commodity traceability, such as for wood, helping companies avoid significant fines. 

We are excited about how the use cases Treefera serves will only grow over time: the underlying cost & quality of the data fabric opens up the long term potential to crack adjacent markets & new greenfield projects, such as derivatives pricing within financial markets, amongst others. 

Every large generational outcome has been a function of replacing a large incumbent and enabling a new set of use cases, with a global reach. We are excited to see both of these variables at play with Treefera. 

Industry veterans driving innovation, with an exciting future ahead

Treefera is co-founded by Jonathan Horn (CEO) and Caroline Grey (CRO). 

Jonathan, a physicist by trade with a PhD in theoretical fluid dynamics, has extensive experience in risk, AI, and data from 15 years at Citi and 5 years at JP Morgan. The genesis of Treefera came from Jonathan solving similar data aggregation and insight problems at JP Morgan. 

Caroline's background includes being Chief Customer Officer at UiPath. UiPath went public in 2021 in what was one of the largest public listings of a technology company at a $35BN market cap. She joined the robotic automation software company in the early stages, when they had a few thousands dollars in revenue, and scaled GTM from Series A to the IPO. She left when UiPath was just shy of $1BN revenue. 

Customers and partners consistently praise the team. Treefera has also been successful in attracting a Tier-1 team across GTM, R&D and Opps, together with strong advisors.

We believe Treefera has built a highly defensible position through its unique data fabric, proprietary models, strong customer validation, and ability to deliver actionable insights at scale. 

We are excited to partner with Jonathan, Caroline, and the Treefera team as they scale globally and capitalize on the massive opportunity in bringing transparency and resilience to global nature-based supply chains.

Why Notion? A note from the Founders

“We chose Notion as our lead investor because of their global platform, deep strategic expertise, and exceptional team of operators. Their understanding of the scale of the opportunity — and appetite to go after it — is perfectly aligned with our mission to bring AI-powered visibility and defensible data to the first mile. We are thrilled to have earned their backing and excited for their support as we accelerate our growth in this next chapter." - Caroline Grey

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