Landseed has secured a $400,000 social-impact investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, bringing the company's total funding to $500,000. The investment supports the build-out of the measurement layer for nature-based markets: AI-enabled sensor hardware, a new ecological commodity called Earth Credits, and a structured data feed called Earth Signals — together designed to make the full output of protected land visible, verifiable, and financially useful.
The investment comes through the Foundation's Social-Impact Investment Program, which backs for-profit ventures whose missions align with its philanthropic strategy and has placed more than $25 million across 77 such ventures. Founded in 1947 and among the fifty largest foundations in the world, the Richard King Mellon Foundation held $3.3 billion in net assets at the end of 2025. Its decision is an institutional vote for a specific idea: that conservation finance needs measurement it can trust before it can scale.
What the investment supports
Landseed's model has three layers, and the investment accelerates all of them. The first is the Earth Pulse Node, an AI-enabled sensor cluster that takes continuous, in-situ readings from the field. The second is Earth Credits, a new commodity class minted from that verified measurement and anchored to a recorded Nature Rights Deed. The third is Earth Signals, a structured reference-data feed licensed across insurance, capital markets, corporate disclosure, and conservation research.
The three compound. Each sensor cluster deployed widens the measurement footprint; denser measurement makes every credit and every signal a more honest representation of ecological reality — and a more useful one for the institutions that have to act on it. Landseed calls the thesis "from measurement to market."
A verifier, not a trader
Landseed is built as a verifier-only company. It owns and operates the monitoring infrastructure, records Nature Rights Deeds, and mints and registers Earth Credits — but it does not trade those credits, operate an exchange, or run funds that hold them. The separation is deliberate, and it is the point.
The carbon market was built to trade testimony about carbon, not carbon. Every market in valuable things has an independent assay office. Gold has had one since 1300. Ecological markets have never had one. That's what we're building.
— Alex Roessner, Co-Founder and Co-CEO
"This is not another offset," said co-founder and co-CEO Greg Curtis, Executive Director of Holdfast Collective. "It is a new commodity class — grounded in property law and ecological science — designed to make the value of healthy land visible, verifiable, and financially useful. The measurement layer is what's been missing."
Why this matters
A market is only as trustworthy as its measurement. The voluntary carbon market faltered because it priced estimates and self-reported baselines; the nature-based market now forming risks the same failure unless something independent measures the ground. This investment backs the proposition that the missing piece is not another credit or another rating, but the instrument beneath them — and the discipline to keep measurement separate from everything built on top of it.
Landseed has initial deployment partners across four continents. The work of putting sensors in the ground is now underway.