Carbon Removal is the Next AirBnb, a Komaza Retrospective

After nearly a decade on the frontier of Forestry and Climate Tech building Komaza, I’m getting ready to start a new chapter. At Komaza, one of our core values was “Keep Growing” (apt for a tree company), and as I do, I’m hoping that sharing stories of our work sheds light on the ongoing imperative to invest in new business models to optimize global landscape use.

During my tenure from 2015-2023 as Chief Technology Officer, Board Member, and eventually President of Komaza, we raised $50M in commercial capital (see coverage in Fast Company & Quartz), built a diverse team of 600+ staff, and planted over 10 million trees across 25,000 farmer families in Kenya–making us one of Africa’s top 3 commercial planters–with the potential to sequester 1M tCO2e, and deliver $60M of life-changing tree-related income back to local communities.

Why trees? The race is on to net zero by 2050. And, while Gates and others have recently, rightly argued that “there is simply not enough land on Earth to tackle climate change by planting trees alone”, carbon removal is an essential component of our blueprint, with Doerr setting a target of 10 gigatons/year in the Speed & Scale Action Plan, alongside emission reductions. And while breakthrough permanent and engineered removal methods are a subject of much exciting research, investments in reforestation remain one of the biggest and cheapest ways to sequester carbon today, extending Earth’s runway to build and scale tomorrow’s technologies.?

According to the most recent IPCC’s AR6 Synthesis Report, of all the solutions available today to curb net emissions by 2030, “reduced conversion of forests and other ecosystems” ranks second only to solar energy. Combined with ecosystem restoration, afforestation, reforestation, and improved sustainable forest management, forest carbon has the potential to remove almost eight gigatons of carbon dioxide per year (GtCO2-eq) from the atmosphere.

Our Vision: Microforestry

At Komaza our mission was to prevent ecosystem collapse by revitalizing land productivity in the world’s most deforested areas. Our big vision was to apply the share economy principles that had transformed traditional industries like Transportation, Hospitality, and Food, to Forestry. We saw a major opportunity to both address Africa’s wood market failure and align communities around sustainable incentives, by building a hyper-scalable network of “microforests” planted, managed, and protected by local farmers. Our rationale was as follows:

1. We must protect AND plant. According to the UN’s FAO, roughly half of Earth’s tropical forests have already been cleared, with an additional 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) of forest lost every year. For example, Coastal Kenya, where Komaza was founded, houses the only remaining 10% of the Coastal Forests of East Africa and is one the of world’s top 11 biodiversity hotspots.?
2. Farmers are essential for forestry. Meanwhile, Africa is already the world’s largest consumer of wood, with the top global deforestation rate – equivalent to Asia + South America combined. With 40% of the world’s people by 2050, Africa’s population density is too high to support its domestic consumption through traditional plantations. As a result, Africa faces a $30B wood supply deficit by 2030. Without new approaches, this translates to further ecosystem devastation and significant economic loss through dependence on imports.
3. Forestry is great for farmers. Founded at a time when the microfinance industry was focused on revolving annual loans, Komaza demonstrated that small-holder farmers, like the rest of us, seek to diversify their investments (in their case, land and labor) into low-risk, long-term opportunities for life-changing savings. With one year’s labor, and ten year’s use of idle land, a one acre tree farm yields an additional 5x annual income – enough money to pay for a child’s entire secondary school education. In sub-saharan drylands, trees offer drought resistance, no need for irrigation, and serve as a frontier species to secure top soils.
4. Microforestry offers a 90% cost disruption. Similar to Airbnb vs hotels or Uber vs taxis, by sharing value with farmers rather than purchasing land and labor upfront, Microforestry offers a significant cost disruption to traditional forestry. When our Series A numbers were in, Komaza demonstrated that we had achieved a 90% cost savings over traditional forestry establishment. This translated to us being able to deliver a COGS of $2/tCO2e, making us one of the cheapest carbon sequestration engines on the planet (500x cheaper than carbon capture technology at the time, and 100x cheaper than leading technology is projected to be in 2050).

Our Platform: Kwingu

Successful share economy companies are built on new approaches to value distribution. But they also rely on new technologies to tackle increased operational complexity, while lowering costs at scale. Having previously served as an advisor to the company, I was brought in full time in 2015 when Komaza closed their Series A to launch this tech start-up within a venture-backed forestry start-up.

At our peak, Komaza’s incredible team of Operations leads, empowered by this platform, was able to coordinate 350 extension staff managing 5000 farms to coordinate successful planting of 2 million trees within a 2-week planting season, every year. Our core innovations included:

• Microforestry Ops-in-a-Box. Like McDonalds to diners, or Starbucks to coffee shops, Komaza’s primary IP was our bespoke “Ops-in-a-Box” system that translated expert forestry protocols (traditionally passed down through graduate programs and apprenticeships) into a simple, vocational training program for farmers. Our Ops Innovations team adapted planting and maintenance protocols into local practices that could be emulated with high fidelity at scale, then A/B tested the outputs season-on-season to adapt them for local populations and ecological conditions.
• The Kwingu Platform. To manage tens of thousands of distributed farms, we built a web and mobile platform for collecting, validating and responding to real-time operational field data. Our Komaza platform (called Kwingu for Komaza-Cloud) evolved our operations binder into an Atul Gawande-style mobile checklist app and data model for real time management of farmer progress. Our Data Operations team automated validation protocols to ensure accurate & efficient evaluation of key waypoints such as site suitability, farmer qualification, and environmental protection. Kwingu enabled us to securitize tree assets on informal lands, and facilitated external partnerships, such as our work with the Kenya Forestry Services to contribute to national planting targets.?
• AI Growth Monitoring. In order to optimize farmer enrollment and tree growth rates, we adapted open source AI learning models to translate broadband satellite data into localized maps by area and species of existing smallholder tree farms. We used this algorithm as the first steps towards automated growth modeling of our collective microforest plots in Coastal Kenya – a novel problem due to the irregular and heterogeneous nature of our small, distributed farms.

Major Milestones

With support from top investors and conservation organizations (including Novastar Ventures, Mulago Foundation, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Partnerships for Forests, Axa IM, FMO, the UNCCD Land Degradation Neutrality Fund, Sobrato Philanthropies, and Mitsui & Co.) Komaza scaled our vertically-integrated Forestry operations across Coastal and Central Kenya. Our major milestones included:

• Field Operations. With Operations leadership from incredible One Acre Fund and Bridge International Academies alumni, we planted over 9,000 ha of trees distributed across 25,000 farmer families.
• Tree Nursery. Our Nursery team built the largest commercial nursery in Kenya, producing 2.2 million top quality seedlings each year. Our crowning agroforestry accomplishment included being the first to develop commercial protocols for the propagation of Melia volkensii, a fast-growing, indigenous hardwood that is well adapted to sub-saharan drylands.?
• Commercial. Our Commercial team designed, constructed, and launched Kenya’s first sawmill featuring kiln drying and finger joining technology, allowing us to more sustainably service market demands with younger growth trees.?
• Carbon Program. With collaboration from our Corporate Finance and Data Science teams, Komaza launched our Verra-certified Carbon Program in 2021. This program featured novel methods for distributed farmer benefit sharing and biomass monitoring. Our Coastal Kenya Carbon Project debuted a first issuance of 83,355 tCO2e, with interested buyers valuing our “charismatic carbon” above market for the time at $25/tCO2e due to our positive impact on both communities and biodiversity.?

In recognition of these contributions, Komaza was awarded the 2020 Environmental Times Impact project/investment of the year - Biodiversity and ecosystems and got recognition and support from the Climate Policy Initiative for our innovative SPV structure to finance sustainable forestry assets. We received full page billing in Apple’s 2021 Environmental Progress Report with the launch of their Restore Fund (p.29) and partnered with the Kenya Forest Research Institute (KEFRI) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to broadly disseminate our Melia propagation protocols to unlock a new, significant portion of Africa’s desertified drylands for commercial forestry.

Much has been written recently about the “Valley of Death” in First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) Climate capital on the journey from proof of concept to scale. Unfortunately, Komaza hit our own valley in 2023 when the global financial crisis meant our Series C raise and SPV launch coincided with the continent’s steepest investment decline in 12 years (a 28% YoY decrease in deal count and 22% decrease in deal value). The long-term value of Komaza's assets remain undeniable, and we have several potential buyers lined up for a competitive process with an impending sale.?

Looking Forward: The Land Share Opportunity

With increasing pressure from governments and consumers alike, corporations are stepping up to offset their impact on the planet. As demand accelerates, we need to unlock new, cost-effective, scalable engines for contributing supply to carbon offset markets. With COGS as low as $2/tCO2e and a potential of 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal per year (GtCO2-eq), natural sequestration solutions present a significant opportunity to meet our Carbon Removal goal of 10 gigatons/year by 2050.

Much attention has been given in Climate Tech to digital measurement, reporting, and verification (DMRV) technologies. And rightly so–robust data is essential for proving additionality and providing a solid foundation for financial markets to value and attribute offsets. Yet, while ongoing development of efficient, accurate monitoring tools are essential, founders and investors must also continue to apply strategies from our last decade of transforming traditional industries using share economy models. From Uber to Instacart, & Airbnb, these companies didn’t stop at the tech stack. They built vertically-integrated, multi-sided markets and transformed their industries by creating and redistributing value to both producers and users.

Based on our experience at Komaza, I see incredible opportunity for a new era of impact funds and start-ups focused exclusively on “Land Share” models applying carbon market financing, remote monitoring, and AI to gig economy growers in rural communities, including Africa and other frontier economies.

With the whole remaining greater than the sum of its parts, I’m hoping the lessons we learned at the tip of the spear of the burgeoning climate industry will benefit others. Ultimately, Komaza’s accomplishments are a testament to how innovative business models can be used to reorganize and scale new pathways of value distribution to the benefit of people, planet, and profit. And I remain eternally grateful to the creative, tireless team of Komaza operations, commercial, technology, finance, and support professionals who forged the path.