A VC Perspective on Nature Tech: Theory of Change, Diligence & What Actually Gets Funded
Session Description
Sand River partners Greg and Gabriel walked through how the firm evaluates nature tech investments, from thesis to due diligence to what actually convinces them to write a check. Drawing on real portfolio examples, they laid out why AI has made nature newly "legible" to investors and corporates alike, and why most nature tech pitches still don't survive their five-stage screening process.
Speakers
Greg Robson, Sand River
Gabby Barker, Sand River
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Sand River has deployed roughly $9.5 million into nature tech since 2022, entirely from private capital and family offices so far, ahead of raising its first formal fund from September.
The firm's thesis: nature has shifted from something people knew mattered to something they can now prove matters, largely because AI makes natural systems "legible" enough to link directly to corporate risk, illustrated by three of the world's seven biggest coffee trading houses collapsing after a price spike tied to climate disruption.
Sand River invests in two areas: technologies that make nature data legible (for example, live surface water hydrology mapping), and technologies that make supply chains more regenerative (for example, Matter's microplastics filtration, now rolled out through IKEA's supply chain, and Rhizocore's fungal alternative to synthetic fertiliser in tree planting).
Their due diligence runs through five stages: proof of positive outcomes for nature, product performance that beats incumbents without needing a "green premium," evidence the market is ready today rather than someday, a team capable of executing, and whether venture capital is even the right type of funding for that business.
Because nature tech is high-risk, Sand River expects roughly half of its portfolio companies to fail or underperform, banking on just a handful of standout exits, out of around 25 investments, to deliver the three-to-four-times return it has promised its investors.
Portfolio company Epoch uses AI and geospatial data to map smallholder supply chains invisible until now, for example plotting tens of thousands of individual tea plots across Malawi, Kenya, and India from a handful of manually labelled examples, letting buyers report on deforestation regulation and pay a premium for verifiably biodiverse farming, without a single site visit.
On whether AI will commoditise this space: Sand River's view is that defensibility sits at the extremes, either owning a proprietary base layer of data before AI models fine-tune on it, or providing trusted human oversight translating that data into business decisions. The middle layer, basic SaaS tools that just repackage the data, is where they're most cautious about investing right now.
Sand River deliberately avoids direct investment in land or nature assets themselves, since the returns don't fit venture fund economics, choosing instead to back the technology it believes could influence practices across the roughly 25% of global land covered by soft commodity supply chains.
Founder vetting is done partly through informal, in-person conversation, "breaking bread" with founders to judge whether their commitment to nature outcomes is genuine, since a wavering sense of purpose is what the firm has seen predict a later drift toward less impactful, more commercially convenient decisions.
