Soil degradation costs the European Union an estimated €50 billion a year, and more than 60% of European soils are classed as unhealthy, and almost nobody can tell you the state of any particular field without putting a spade in it. Soil is the rare asset everyone depends on and nearly no one measures. Seqana, founded in Berlin in 2020, just raised €3.2 million to fix the measuring part, pairing satellite imagery with machine learning to quantify what is happening underground across millions of hectares, and to turn that into a number a company can carry on a balance sheet.

The round was led by Pymwymic, the Amsterdam impact fund whose name is an acronym for “put your money where your mouth is capital,” with existing backers HTGF and Counteract returning and a startup loan from Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank, Germany’s agricultural development bank. The mix of venture equity and debt is its own quiet admission: hardware-adjacent climate companies that need to fund fieldwork and ground sampling cannot live on equity alone. The company is run by three co-founders, Stefan Gönner as chief executive, Julian Kremers as chief science officer and Jakob Levin as chief commercial officer, the division of labour you build when the product is equal parts science and sales.

When you write the ruler, you own more than a product

Seqana builds what the industry calls digital MRV, for monitoring, reporting and verification, and its first market was carbon. Measuring soil organic carbon, the keystone indicator of soil health, and proving it accumulated over time, is how you sell credits on the voluntary carbon market and how you prove a regenerative-farming intervention actually worked. The technical method is to pair proprietary machine-learning models with ground-truth samples and satellite imagery, producing tools like Digital Soil Maps that estimate carbon across a whole landscape rather than the handful of points a soil scientist could physically dig.

The shrewd move is what Seqana did with that capability beyond selling it. The company co-authored Verra’s VM0042 v3 methodology and Gold Standard’s soil-carbon model guidelines, the actual rulebooks that every other player in the voluntary carbon market now has to measure against. When you write the ruler, you have built something more durable than a feature, because your competitors are forced to operate inside the standard you helped define. Seqana says it has assessed roughly 1.8 million hectares across more than 25 countries, which is the kind of scale that turns a methodology credential into a moat.

Carbon got it in the door, supply-chain fear is the bigger room

What the new money buys is a widening of scope, from carbon alone to the rest of what healthy soil quietly delivers: yield stability, crop quality, the resilience of a food company’s supply chain. “Carbon is core to what we do, and it stays that way,” said Gönner. “What this round adds is the ability to manage the rest of what healthy soil delivers.” The plainer reading is that soil carbon got Seqana through the door, and supply-chain risk is the much larger room behind it. That room is filling with worried tenants. Agrifood companies, lenders and insurers are all starting to treat soil health as a measurable financial exposure rather than an agronomic abstraction.

The number that makes a chief financial officer pay attention is from the field, not the spreadsheet. During the 2023 droughts in Europe, French farms running advanced regenerative practices lost about 8% of their yields, against 22% on the least regenerative farms. That gap is the whole investment thesis rendered as a survival statistic: in a bad year, the health of your dirt is the difference between a dent and a disaster, and the companies that sell Europe its food are the ones holding the risk. Seqana’s customers already include Danone, Bayer, Klim and eAgronom, which is to say the firms feeding the continent are paying to find out what their soil is worth before the next drought tells them for free.

The bear case is the one that haunts every carbon-measurement company: the voluntary carbon market has been volatile and, at times, openly distrusted, and a business whose first revenue leans on it inherits that fragility. Seqana’s answer is to climb off the carbon market and onto the balance sheet, to sell soil data as supply-chain insurance rather than as offsets. Whether that pivot pays is the open question. What is already true is harder to argue with: the company that wrote part of the rulebook is now selling the measurements everyone graded against it will need. The ground, for once, has a price.