What the business is
California startup selling Land Tender, a SaaS tool that combines satellite and lidar data to model how land-management choices affect ecosystems and wildfire risk.
The bet
Large landowners with wildfire exposure, starting with utilities, will pay for cloud land-management software priced by acre, not by seat.
Starting capital
$17M pre-seed and seed announced June 2022, plus government grants, before the Series A.
How it started
Vibrant Planet grew out of California's wildfire seasons. Its early customers were governments and nonprofit organisations focused mainly on land conservation and species preservation. TechCrunch had covered its seed round in 2022, and the company raised $17M in pre-seed and seed funding.
What happened
By October 2023 it had signed a deal with PG&E, a roughly $38B utility whose service area spans 70,000 square miles of wildfire-prone land. CEO Allison Wolff called the utility a very natural partner because it owns large amounts of land and at-risk infrastructure and wants to reduce fuel beds. Land Tender is priced by acres managed rather than per seat, which Vibrant Planet says brings more stakeholders into a project. It was used on 7 million acres.
How it ended up
The $15M Series A, led by the Ecosystem Integrity Fund with Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund, Citi Ventures and others, brought total raised to $34M including grants. Wolff said Vibrant Planet was talking to other utilities; PG&E was its only major corporate customer announced. The company also hired scientists from academia, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and NASA.
What has to be true
Governments and nonprofits made up its customer base, and they spend less and take longer to buy than for-profit companies.
PG&E owns large areas of land and at-risk infrastructure and wants to reduce the fuel beds that feed catastrophic fires.
Per-acre pricing, rather than per-seat, makes it easier to bring many stakeholders onto the platform.
A cloud tool pre-loaded with remote-sensing data is easier to adopt than assembling the same from tools such as ESRI's ArcGIS.
What can be applied
When your first customers are slow-buying agencies and nonprofits, one deep-pocketed commercial anchor can change the story you tell investors.
Aftermath
As of 5 October 2023, Vibrant Planet had raised $34M in total, had signed PG&E and was in talks with other utilities. Land Tender covered 7 million acres. TechCrunch said it was too early for firm predictions about whether wildfire management can support a venture-scale business.
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