Good Morning! Today in your weekly dose of Natural Capital and NatureTech we’re deep diving into Genomines recent $45Mn Series A led by Engine Ventures & Forbion BioEconomy. Read on for more.
In today’s edition:
🔮 Genomines - Mining Nickel with Plants
💰 $50M+ in new deals
💼 The latest news across Big business, Finance and Tech
💬 The Challenge
AI is driving a huge surge in data center demand. By 2030, we'll need to build roughly 2,000+ new data centers globally-enough computing power to train millions of AI models. Training a single AI model like GPT-4 used as much electricity as 6,000 homes use in a year.
Grid connection is the critical bottleneck for getting DC and Renewables projects built. Grid connection queues now stretch 5-7 years in many regions. Projects fall through because developers can't secure power capacity in time.
This makes "powered land"- property near substations with available electricity-the new gold rush. Developers will pay premium prices for sites that dramatically increase the chances their data centers actually get realized. The same is true for renewables projects. In Northern Virginia, land now sells for over $4 million per acre-that's 2-4 times what the same land cost just 18 months ago as a result of DC development.
Meanwhile, other land uses are also becoming increasingly important: carbon sequestration, housing, geothermal and nuclear, and conservation sites, to name a few.
Landowners today are at a massive disadvantage. When data center / solar / carbon credit companies approach landowners about buying property, most owners have no idea what their land is actually worth. They don't know if the offer is fair or if they're sitting on extremely valuable land. Meanwhile, developers have teams and sophisticated software helping them find the best sites = An information asymmetry problem.
To close this information asymmetry gap today landowners only really options are expensive and timely land surveys. For a timberland owner managing 500,000 acres, evaluating even 10% of parcels (50,000 acres) using traditional consultants and site surveys can cost hundreds of thousands to millions in fees, and is done in an inconsistent manner.
The big question: How do landowners figure out what their land is really worth-and capture fair value when developers come calling?
⛏ Enter Aarden
Step 1: Pulling together all the puzzle pieces: Aarden's software combines scattered data about power lines, internet cables, planning permission rules, biodiversity, land stability, solar potential, carbon sequestration capacity, and past land sales into one platform -information that exists across hundreds of different sources but has never been unified.
Step 2: Landowners and capital allocators ask questions in plain english: Landowners can simply ask: "Which of my properties has data center potential?" or "Would this land drive higher cash on cash returns as timberlands or a carbon project?"
Step 3: The software analyses all of the landowners potential options: The solution analyses millions of acres to determine the value and returns on the land across data centers, solar, wind, carbon credits, conservation, and traditional uses like timber. Sometimes the answer is simple: This is timberland today...and you're going to have the most success with it staying as timber.
Step 4: Connect landowners with vetted developers: Aarden connects landowners with vetted developers and helps benchmark offers against actual market rates. In a latitude media article the founder, Danan Margason, stated "We've built out a network of developers that we think are trustworthy actors."
Real Impact: For a landowner with 500,000 acres (the size of Rhode Island), Aarden finds land suitable for high-value infrastructure (worth $500,000 to $4 million per acre), identifies which parcels work for solar or carbon, and confirms which portions should remain as forest.
🏢 Company Overview
Founded: March 2025 (launched publicly October 2025) | Location: Seattle, WA
Founders: Danan Margason (CEO, previously led product at Carbon Direct) + Ben Hudson (Head of Applied Science, worked on Zillow's home price estimates)
Latest Funding: October 2025 | $4 million seed round led by Planeteer Capital & Founders Co-op
Investors: Planeteer Capital, Founders Co-op, Stepchange Ventures, KDX Management, Superorganism
Customer Profile: The platform's clients generally own 10,000 acres or more-mostly large businesses and institutions
Progress: Platform launched fall 2025. AI currently covers 5 separate use cases and leverages over one hundred unique land-based datapoints.
Business model: Currently subscription, evolving toward usage-based fees. Planning another fundraise in the next 18 months.
🏢 Competitors
NCX and Paces: Help developers find land for data centers and solar-the opposite side of the market from Aarden
Real Estate Software (Forbury, MRI, Edozo): These work for buildings like offices and stores, but don't analyse whether empty land is good for data centers, solar, or carbon projects
The Old Way: Most large landowners still use spreadsheets and hire expensive consultants - this is Aarden's biggest competition
🚀 Tailwinds
Huge market with urgent need. Institutional investors own over $300 billion worth of forest and land in North America, an area larger than California. Software for land planning could grow from about $1.5 billion today to nearly $8 billion by 2033.
Land is suddenly worth way more for infrastructure. Companies building AI and renewable infrastructure are paying 5-10 times normal land prices for the right locations. But without systematic analysis, landowners miss these opportunities.
Technology is finally good enough. AI can now handle the complexity of analyzing thousands of properties across multiple use cases at once-something that used to require teams of consultants working for months.
🌬️ Headwinds
Getting to decision grade analytics on a small number of projects: Unlike residential real estate with millions of transactions, infrastructure land deals are sparser. Aarden is training on all US land transactions, but achieving 90%+ accuracy on specialized use cases remains difficult when comparable examples are limited. This will be critical to build a long-term moat from well-funded organisations in adjacent sectors (like CoStar of Zillow).
Portfolio view vs. vertical-specific tools? Tools like Paces (solar-focused) and others offer deep vertical expertise for specific use cases. Aarden's bet is that a broad portfolio view—understanding all potential uses simultaneously—creates a different kind of value than point solutions. Will customers prefer breadth over or alongside depth?
Will land become the next great asset class?Right now, natural capital investing is half a percent to two percent of institutional fund allocation. It's performed quite well. It's recession-resistant. But people think of natural capital as timber and sometimes agriculture. According to Danan “Aarden’s thesis is that land will become a liquid, diversified asset class with mainstream portfolio allocation”, and they will be the partner to guide that allocation. Will this play out?
🌬️ Hear it from the experts
🌱 Why Superorganism Invested
Kevin Webb GP @ Superorganism
The Secular Wave Is Coming-With or Without Environmental Data
"This is a massive secular need, and the urgency is really high. It's the first time in decades where power consumption is going to be going up by a dramatic factor. Fighting this momentum is impossible and we want to ensure that comprehensive land and nature data is in the hands of the decision makers."
Comprehensive Data Comes Too Late
"For the most part, whether you're talking about renewable infrastructure or data centers, comprehensive site data - including nature data - is currently an afterthought. It's discovered late in the process..."
By the time companies realise they've purchased land with regulatory constraints or environmental permitting requirements they've already sunk millions into construction plans. The result? Massive delays, legal battles, or abandoned projects.
The Strategic Bet: Put Data in Developers' Hands Early
The thesis: if all site characteristics are visible at the moment of land selection—not discovered after purchase—economics will drive better outcomes. A parcel that's $3 million per acre but has three-year permitting risk becomes less attractive than a $3.5 million parcel with a clear regulatory path.
The Beautiful End State
"It could be that one of the best things you could do from a financial perspective is leave the land alone. That would be a beautiful end state."
Webb's fund exists to make that outcome profitable: "We're always interested in things that make keeping land intact more profitable, more attractive, and easier for the people who hold that property."
Summary
Aarden is betting that land will evolve from a niche alternative asset to a mainstream, liquid asset class—and that closing the information gap between landowners and developers will unlock billions in value currently trapped by opacity and inefficient price discovery.
The infrastructure boom driven by AI, renewable energy, and electrification is repricing land across North America. Aarden's bet: the landowners with the best information will capture the most value.
We'd love to hear your perspective. What did we miss? Please get in touch.
📩 Written by Ollie and Pat. Feel free to send us deals, announcements, or anything else using the link below or via LinkedIn.
