"Biodiversity is the next frontier" – this VC-turned-founder just secured €1.5m to save ecosystems with AI

Paris-based biodiversity analytics startup Darwin has secured €1.5m in pre-seed funding from French impact heavyweights Astérion Ventures and several other prominent angel investors. Amid a 'biodiversity crisis' – with wildlife and flora populations plummeting around the world – as well as incoming EU legislation that will require a lot more ESG reporting, Darwin aims to give companies the oversight they need to limit their own impact.

A biodiversity crisis

Biodiversity is a relatively underlooked issue when it comes to the global climate crisis. Ecosystems are delicate things, with even minor changes to them throwing everything off balance. The world's oceans, wetlands, mangroves and forests, among other ecosystems, are responsible for sequestering a huge amount of carbon emissions. These systems are in a crisis, thanks in no small part to the impact of business and industrialisation.

Darwin, founded in March 2024 by Aurore Falque-Pierrotin, Cyprien Hallé and Antoine Vallier, offers businesses an AI-backed SaaS platform to give full oversight over their own contribution to biodiversity decline.

The company came together after Falque-Pierrotin, while working at VC fund Samaipata, began to notice that the conversations she was seeing about environmental impact were mostly focused on carbon and GHG emissions, with biodiversity often left unconsidered. She realised there was a long way to go when it came to companies measuring their full environmental impact.

"The trend started with carbon, and biodiversity is the next frontier," Falque-Pierrotin told Impact Loop.

Falque-Pierrotin and her Samaipata colleague Hallé, who has a background in engineering, eventually left to start Darwin along with third founder Vallier, a former derivatives trader who has been working in biodiversity measurement for decades.

In contrast to carbon emissions, which is a fairly discrete metric, biodiversity presents a huge challenge to businesses trying to measure their impact. At the same time, the impacts can be diffuse: while one tonne of carbon emitted has basically the same impact everywhere, biodiversity impacts can be highly localized. Measuring this multifaceted impact involves crunching "a huge amount of qualitative data, there are huge challenges," says Falque-Pierrotin. "It’s impossible to do it on excel."

The trend started with carbon, and biodiversity is the next frontier

Darwin's software offers businesses and ESG consultants working with them the tools to measure their ‘biodiversity footprint’ along the five commonly used drivers of biodiversity loss: change to ecosystems, the use of rare natural resources, climate change, pollution and the introduction of invasive species.

Similar to carbon accounting, the process looks at the inputs of a company and evaluates how those materials contribute to biodiversity.

"The end goal is translating the company footprint into metrics that are concrete, actionable and easily understood,” says Falque-Pierrotin, “and of course to help implement an action plan and reduce those impacts."

Seachange in European sustainability reporting

The impetus for European companies to gain oversight over their biodiversity impacts is no longer just a question of individual concern for the environment. The EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Reporting directive (CSRD), which was soft-launched at the beginning of 2024 and will fully roll out over the next few years, mandates stringent requirements for companies to keep track of their ESG impact.

The new European Sustainability Reporting Standards under the CSRD mean companies will have to specifically include biodiversity and ecosystem impacts in their reporting for the first time. The CSRD is one of the most talked about things affecting the French business ecosystem in recent years, with many companies scrambling to get on top of the new requirements before they become subject to them.

"The biggest impact of the CSRD is that it is forcing companies above 250 employees to disclose their impact and dependence on biodiversity” says Falque-Pierrotin. “The consultancies we’re working with historically have focussed on large listed companies that were the pioneers of integrating biodiversity into their strategies. What the CSRD does is broadening the market from those early adopters to the bulk of companies across industries. It’s really creating a new market."

First funding round, scaling begins

Late last week Darwin secured €1.5m in funding to build up its tech and product teams and begin scaling up their products. The funding was led by Astérion Ventures, one of the leaders in impact investing in France, with €40m under management.

Marine Reygrobellet, a partner at Astérion, will join Darwin’s board:

"We chose to invest in Darwin because we firmly believe in their ability to transform the biodiversity sector," Reygrobellet told Impact Loop. "They offer a unique solution to overcome the challenges associated with managing massive, complex, and heterogeneous data, which hinder actionable efforts in favor of biodiversity.