Kodama Systems
Our Investment in Kodama Systems
Full-stack, technology-powered forest restoration
It’s difficult to ignore the growing intensity of wildfires around the world, with pictures of orange skies and charred forests plastering the news in recent summers. Wildfires are burning more land due to climate change and historical forest mismanagement, threatening communities and healthy ecosystems. In particular, climate change is causing a drier, hotter, and longer wildfire season, increasing the risk that a wildfire sparks and spreads rapidly—the summer wildfire season is around 60 days longer than it was 30 years ago. In the United States, the average area burned annually by wildfires since 2000 is 7 million acres, more than double the average of 3.3 million acres in the 1990s. Without intervention to help forests adapt to climate change, this average is likely to increase drastically in fire prone areas such as the American West. Additionally, as trees burn due to a hotter, drier climate, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, further exacerbating climate change.
Diagram illustrating the benefits of tree-thinning on wildfire damage. Source: The Nature Conservancy
However, a changing climate is not the only driver for increasing wildfires. Previous forest management practices in the U.S., characterized by the ban on indigenous prescribed-burns and passage of policies promoting fire suppression in the early 1900s, have resulted in overcrowded forests. By preventing small, low-intensity wildfires that have historically thinned vegetation, forests are now overly dense, filled with tightly-packed fuel through which fire spreads easily. This crowded forest structure amplifies the drying effects of climate change, increasing incidents of “megafires” – individual fires that burn more than 100,000 acres.
To improve wildfire resilience and restore forests to their ecologically stable state, a portion of the vegetation must be thinned, by as much as 50%. To accelerate progress on this front, Kodama Systems (Kodama) is leveraging technology to improve forest thinning productivity and utilize waste biomass for durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We’re very excited to announce our investment in Kodama as it revolutionizes the future of forest management.
What is Kodama?
Waste biomass, too small or flawed to be sold as timber, is typically burned on-site. Photo credit: Kodama
Kodama Systems, a forestry company based in Sonora, CA encompasses a full stack, technology-based method of integrating forest operations and utilizing biomass for CDR. On the front end, Kodama is improving forest thinning operations to treat more acres with less labor. The company plans on storing the waste from these thinning operations, which is often left to burn or decay, in “wood vaults” as a stable form of carbon. By using technology from adjacent industries, such as low earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity, Kodama Systems is fostering forest connectivity that enables the use of teleoperation and automated equipment. These innovations have the potential to raise productivity by 300%, as well as increase the profit margins of thinning efforts significantly.
Waste biomass, which consists of branches or logs too small to be sold as timber products, will be extracted from project sites and transported to a wood vault. The vault drastically slows the decomposition process of the wood stored inside, containing carbon for millennia. With hundreds of millions of tons of waste biomass projected across thinning projects, there is no shortage of supply and Kodama’s vault systems can scale to meet the world’s growing CDR needs. Estimated costs for vault CDR come below $100/metric ton CO2e. Combining a connected, autonomous forestry operation with research-backed carbon storage methods enables Kodama to integrate vertically and achieve scale in a nearly $20 billion market.
Why did we invest?
Co-founder Merritt Jenkins and Kodama team members explain teleoperation and semi-autonomy modifications on its machine to guests during a recent demonstration. Photo credit: Kodama
Compelling Founder-Market Fit
Merritt Jenkins and Matt Verminski are experienced founders with a strong history of tackling complex industrial problems. Together, they have been working with forest operators, landowners, environmental nonprofits, and government agencies for the past several years to identify the most compelling opportunity in forestry.
Merritt Jenkins, CEO, is a serial founder with expertise in autonomous outdoor robotic systems. Prior to co-founding Kodama Systems, Merritt was a co-founder at Pattern Ag, an agricultural technology company focused on soil analysis that has raised $60M to-date. Merritt has an MBA from MIT, an MS in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, and a BE/BA in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College.
Merritt Jenkins (left) and Matt Verminski (right) touring a potential project site. Photo credit: Kodama
Matt Verminski, CTO, has led the development of various complex electromechanical systems from early concept to volume production. Before Kodama, he started and led Desktop Metal engineering, which invented metal 3D printing solutions for prototyping and manufacturing. As part of the initial Kiva Systems team (now Amazon Robotics), Matt led hardware engineering. Early in his career, he co-founded and led systems engineering for mimio. Matt has an MS in electrical engineering from MIT and a BS in computer engineering from Tufts, and 42 issued US patents.
Matt and Merritt have leveraged their combined experience in scaling automation and nature-based technologies to deliver a profitable climate solution bolstered by a passionate team of engineers and forestry personnel. A testament to their leadership abilities, Kodama is supported by several influential climate-tech organizations such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Congruent Ventures.
A Climate Solution Within a Bottlenecked Industry
Kodama is seizing an opportunity to solve for two key obstacles limiting landscape scale forest restoration in the Western US. First, the workforce is not growing to meet the demand. Current business owners are aging out of the industry and there are limited programs to support new workers in rural areas. By introducing teleoperations and autonomous forest thinning equipment, Kodama lowers costs and increases productivity of operations challenged by limited workforce availability. Second, the process of thinning forests creates significant amounts of small-diameter biomass that has little marketable use. Today, waste biomass is often burned for disposal, which emits its stored carbon into the atmosphere. Instead of fire-prone biomass being discarded or burned, Kodama’s wood vaults are a solution for removing this waste biomass and storing it for CDR credits. These credits can be sold within the growing voluntary carbon removal market and eventually counted towards government climate initiatives. In November 2022, Kodama was awarded a $250K grant and a $250K pre-purchase option contract for the CDR from their first wood vault by Frontier Climate, an advanced market commitment geared towards scaling innovative carbon removal solutions.
Furthermore, Kodama’s forest restoration services compound to create substantial positive impact. Thinning reduces the risk of high-intensity fires within forests, which lowers the intensity of carbon-emitting wildfires that contribute to climate change. By avoiding emissions from these wildfires, it's possible to mitigate serious stressors of climate change, which increase forests' resilience to fires. Through this feedback loop, as well as the added benefits of creating fuel breaks to slow encroaching fires, Kodama Systems aims to deliver a measurable impact on forest ecosystems, neighboring communities, and the climate as a whole.
We look forward to supporting Kodama as they transform the forestry industry to foster a safer and healthier natural environment.
Resources
MIT Technology Review: A stealth effort to bury wood for carbon removal has just raised millions
GreenBiz: A deceptively simple technology for Carbon Removal
OpenAir This is CDR: CDR via Woody Biomass Burial with Kodama and Yale Carbon Containment Lab
Skilled Labor Series: Wildland Firefighting with James Sedlak
