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Mast Reforestation planter at a restoration site. (Mast Photo)
Seattle’s Mast Reforestation announced today $25 million in new funding and an expansion of its operations into “wood vaulting” in which carbon that’s captured in vegetation is locked away.
In its approach to vaulting, Mast is taking wildfire scorched trees and burying them underground in conditions where they won’t rot and release carbon.
The strategy helps prep a site for replanting — and perhaps even more importantly, the company plans to sell carbon credits for the removed CO2, helping fund forest restoration.
“Wildfire-destroyed trees pose both a hazard and an opportunity,” said Grant Canary, Mast CEO, in a statement. “By burying this biomass, we lock away additional carbon, clear the way for new seedlings to thrive, and reduce the risk of these trees fueling future wildfires.
What began nearly a decade ago as a drone startup replanting landscapes toasted by wildfires has expanded to include tech-enhanced forest management practices from pine cone to carbon-capturing trees.
Mast is already offering carbon credits for the saplings that it plants. The wood vaulting takes the revenue stream full circle, from new growth to singed woody debris.
The company’s work starts with forest drone surveys and gathering pine cones from which tree seeds are harvested. The seeds are prepped and some are grown into seedlings rooted in engineered pucks that boost their chance of survival. Then Mast uses satellite images to guide planting efforts, which are largely done by hand. The plots are carefully monitored to track tree survival and ensure carbon capture.
Mast launched as the startup DroneSeed, and in 2023 created a parent company called Mast Reforestation — a reference to the forestry term “mast years,” which is an infrequent event when trees produce a bumper crop of seed-bearing cones.
At time went by, Mast’s team realized that a shortage of suitable tree seeds was impeding its efforts, leading it to acquire three seed companies. In 2021, it purchased Silvaseed, a 130-year-old Western Washington company and the largest private seed supplier west of Colorado. Two years later, it took over both Cal Forest Nurseries, a major supplier of tree seed and seedlings for California, and Oregon seed supplier and processor Siskiyou Seed.
Mast is now the biggest seed supplier in the Western U.S. It’s implementing new technologies to the businesses to help modernize and improve operations.
At the same time, the company has strategized new means to unlock funding for landowners eager to restore their torched properties. A few years ago it started a partnership with the nonprofit One Tree Planted to facilitate the sale of carbon credits for planting projects. Now it’s working to verify the carbon removed through wood vaulting to sell credits there as well.
The Series B funding was co-led by new investor Pulse Fund and past investor Social Capital.
Other participants in the round include Elemental Impact; Spero Ventures, with Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning as board observer; Thistledown Capital; Julius Genachowski, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; and Resilience Reserve.
Return investors include Seven Seven Six, Gaingels, Climate Avengers, Climate Capital, Drone.vc, Asymmetry Ventures and Massive Capital Partners.
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