Seqana

Carbon markets provide a mechanism for polluters to compensate farmers for their regenerative practices and sustainable stewardship of soils. However entry into these markets comes with necessarily strict and unecessarly expensive monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) requirements to ensure trust in the markets and to accurately quantify carbon sequestration. 

CQuest offers a solution that is 10x cheaper and 60x faster than conventional monitoring through an SaaS platform that analyzes soil carbon sequestration by harnessing the power of satellite imagery and machine learning. 

Our solution frees up the time and finances of the expert farmers, consultants, and organizations that drive carbon sequestration in soils globally. This  allows for more projects to take place, more farmers to be compensated for regenerative practices, and to build more climate resilient communities that are less susceptible to extreme weather phenomenon- all while sequestering global atmospheric carbon. 

Monitoring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) of carbon credits is THE bottleneck limiting the growth of the carbon markets. While critically important to maintaining the integrity of an offset, current MRV practices are expensive and slow to implement, tying up the time of the farmers and organizers of carbon negative projects. These practices typically include months or years of planning, decades long sampling plans, specialized equipment, laboratory analysis, and 3rd party audits. 

Our satellite based approach brings a transparency, ease of deployment, and actionable near-real-time insights that are not yet seen in carbon markets.

There are an estimated 570 million farmers in the world. Our goal is to provide MRV that is easy and affordable enough that anyone with a smartphone can download a report of their land and get compensated for their carbon negative practices. Our scalable architecture and solution could allow for a revolutionary era of sustainable/regenerative land use management, financed directly by the polluters themselves. 

Economic and social paradigms often discourage the farmers from adopting restorative agricultural practices. CQuest is a platform agnostic MRV tool, that will enable established and incumbent marketplaces to reliably and affordably quantify soil carbon offsets and meet the growing global demand. 

The CQuest solution is a SaaS platform that allows project proponents (farmers, non-profits, for-profits, large multinational corporations, or governments who create carbon offsets with Nature-based Climate Solutions) to reduce the time and money they spend on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV). 

Traditionally project proponents spend months or years planning and implementing a limited sampling schemes. In contrast, using satellite imagery, and machine learning, our algorithms can monitor carbon changes anywhere on earth with a click of a button from the comfort of your own desk. 

Leading soil mapping efforts like ISRIC’s Soil Grids, or the FAO’s World Soils lack the temporal and spatial resolution to measure farm-scale changes in carbon. To address this market gap CQuest is building regional algorithms with public and proprietary datasets in cooperation with our development partners and future customers. 

Our platform is built to scale using web services and computing platforms from Google. As an early comercial adopter of the Google Earth Engine, CQuest is on the cutting edge in terms of the ability to license spatial information reliably, affordably, and with virtually unlimited scale. 

Our solution is currently designed for project developers of Nature-base Climate Solutions (NCS), specifically with respect to regenerative soil practices. Project developers is an industry term ranging from farmers, non-profits, for-profits, large multinational corporations, or governments who create carbon offsets with Nature-based Climate Solutions.

While the definition of project proponent encompasses many different individuals, organizations, and institutions, it is important to remember that farmers, ranchers, and land managers are at the core of all NCS projects. CQuest will directly and meaningfully improve the lives of these individuals through increased access

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The CQuest solution is designed to be a win-win solution for land managers and at-climate-risk populations. By reducing the financial and administrative hurdles surrounding MRV, we make it easier and faster for land managers, such as farmers and ranchers, to get paid for their verified regenerative land practices. In addition to expediting ongoing projects, by cutting costs, we open the gates to previously infeasible projects that could not be implemented due to budgetary and administrative restrictions. 

An estimated 75% of land on our planet is degraded. By enabling the scaling of mechanisms by which polluters can directly offset some of their environmental impact, we can begin to restore these ecosystems in cooperation with the local communities that know them best. Healthier ecosystems are resilient to the drought and flood patterns that have become increasingly common globally. 

CQuest is currently working with project proponents around the world to develop our SaaS. With these formalized partnerships, we are at the pulse of the needs of the land managers, and are building platforms that will directly benefit them in the form of fewer costs and less time invested in the monitoring, reporting, and verification of their carbon negative projects.

The world's 570 million farmers and ranchers are our first line of defense when it comes to building resilient ecosystems. Generally these farmers are families and communities who have generations worth of experience managing the land. 

Billions of dollars in commitments from the polluters such as Microsoft, Google, Shell, BP, and more exhibit a desire to offset emissions through NCS. By driving down the administrative and financial cost to entry of the Voluntary Carbon Markets, CQuest’s Earth Observation based SaaS, can change the incentives these farmers have and reward practices that sequester carbon and restore ecosystems.

As of May 2021 CQuest is currently transitioning from the prototype stage into the pilot stage. We have implemented prototype algorithms and a software solution called CQuest.Earth that allows project proponents to access basic GIS services related to their regenerative projects for free. Now we are working with project developers to develop the first remote sensing verified carbon offsets for a regenerative grassland project with a Gold Standard certification. 

Our pilot projects have been developed are ongoing in North America, and in Argentina and focus primarily on regenerative grazing projects. Grasslands make up to 40% of our earth's surface and are an ideal candidate for both large scale offsetting, and remote sensing MRV due to the homogeneity of the landscapes.

Our solution presents both a business model and technological innovations. Our approach will enable the project developers of NCS to scale their solitons and finance them in new and existing carbon markets through an improved MRV process. 

Our business model innovation is that our MRV can be priced on a per hectare per analysis basis. Unlike current MRV calculations that require budgeting of staffing, sampling, and report generation that are subject to human error and external factors like weather, climate, political instability, public health risks (COVID), and adapted sampling requirements, our solution can be budget easily, at a discounted rate, and executed from the comfort of your own desk. 

Our Technological innovation is the adaptation of International Soil Reference and Information Centre's (IRIC) approach for soil modeling using remote sensing. 

Currently our solution serves a few pilot customers. In the next year we expect to expand land under management that uses CQuest MRV to aproximatley 500,000 hectares. In 5 years we expect to be conducting MRV for between 25 - 50 Million hectares of land around the world. 

We are working in close coordination with research entities, regulators, and our pilot customers on developing our solution. Our goal is to begin to impact SDG 15 Target "a" by the end of the year. 

We are currently a team of 4 full time staff and are funded by the German Ministry of Economics. 

Our team has known each other for more than 10 years and has worked together in various capacities since meeting (and living together) in our Bachelors studies. 

Stefan has founded 2 start-ups, and worked at 4 others. As head of business development at LiveEO he scaled a team from pre-seed to 30+ employees and worked closely with the founders to create scalable products in the earth observation and market research sphere. 

Julian has an academic background in Environmental Management, Geoinformation Science and Remote sensing. Most recently he worked for satellite data provider Planet and led the remote sensing team at LiveEO. In that capacity he also coordinated an agile team of DevOps engineers and software developers as the Scrum Master. He holds a certificate in Professional Scrum with Kanban.

Jakob has an academic background in Environmental Management and GIS, and has worked as a PM in various industries. Most recently he was a senior project manager for a 25M Euro project for the German Federal Foreign Office where he oversaw a team of 15 employees and was responsible for implementation, documentation, and accounting of 300+ projects.

CQuest has a strong commitment to diversity in all its forms. Our founders understand the strength that diverse teams bring to all teams. 

To ensure a gender balance among our team, we have posted all internship openings to a forum called Women of Tech. This was recommended to us by mentors of ours who are actively involved in diversity in tech. So far, half of our team (aside from the founders) has been women. 

As our business continues to grow it will be important to continue the push for gender and ethnic diversity on our team. Not only does it speak to our values of inclusion and equity, but will benefit the growth and culture of the company. 

We are applying to solve to join an extensive network of industry experts and scientists. Our solution is highly technical and faces various scientific, regulatory, and adoption barriers. While we are confident in our ability to navigate this niche, support from Solve and MIT would propel us forward through strategic partnerships and access to experts. As a trust indicator we expect support from Solve would help open doors in global markets. 

To maintain the level of scientific scrutiny required by the carbon markets, it is our task to defend our analysis in peer reviewed papers. It would be great to collaborate with EAPS at MIT on some research to help strengthen our technology and to advance soil mapping in the scientific community. 

EAPS at MIT would be the perfect fit for us. We would bring a consortium of German and European organizations and could collaborate advanced signal processing for soil organic carbon / ecosystem analysis. 

Our solution requires processing of large global datasets in many ecosystems around the world and servicing these analysis to customers on a web based SaaS platform. Support from ServiceNow would slingshot our analytical capabilities.

Together with ServiceNow we would enable the scaling of Nature-based Climate Solutions- projects that maximize the potential of natural processes to sequester carbon and restore natural ecosystems. 

Our application supports nature based climate solutions, which typically focus on at risk ecosystems and communities. Changes in Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) stock can be quantified by combining satellite data such as MODIS, Landsat, and Sentinel (-1, and -2) as well as commercial data and using them in advanced machine learning models such as ensemble learning, bayesian networks and markov random fields.