Understory Labs
Understory provides end-to-end data infrastructure for forest carbon projects across Latin America, combining a multi-sensor field rig with LiDAR, 360° cameras, and GNSS to measure biomass, species, and growth tree by tree. Their UnderstoryOS platform generates monitoring plans, daily QA, and auditable reports that calibrate satellite and drone data with ground truth, reducing MRV cycles from months to weeks. The system is already deployed across 190K hectares at the largest carbon project in Peru.
- Clean Technology
- Data & Analytics
- Internet of Things
- Regulatory & Compliance Technology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Hardware
- Software Only
Funding
Founders
Founder details are not available yet.
Product
Problem
Forest carbon projects struggle to produce credible, verifiable evidence of their climate impact. Traditional monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) cycles take 6–8 months, rely on sparse manual plot measurements, and often fail to meet the rigorous standards of auditors, registries, and funders, undermining trust in carbon credits.
Solution
Understory builds a complete data infrastructure for forest carbon projects, combining custom hardware, software, machine learning, and field operations into one integrated stack. Their multi-sensor rig—featuring LiDAR, 360° cameras, and GNSS—is leased to projects, not sold, and captures tree-by-tree measurements of biomass, structure, species, and growth. The UnderstoryOS platform turns this raw data into monitoring plans, daily field QA, and validation documents with a click-through trail to sensor data, producing auditable reports that registries and funders rely on. By anchoring satellite and drone data with measured ground truth, Understory creates a calibrated multi-scale pyramid that reduces MRV cycles from 6–8 months to as little as 4 weeks.
Target Audience
Primary customers are forest carbon project developers and communities across Latin America, particularly those managing large-scale REDD+ and restoration projects in Peru, Brazil, Panama, and Mexico who need auditable MRV data to secure carbon credit certification and funding.
Features
- Multi-sensor field rig combining LiDAR, 360° cameras, and GNSS in a single unit, engineered by hardware alumni of NASA and Intel, leased rather than sold
- UnderstoryOS generates methodology-compliant monitoring plans with stratified sampling and accuracy targets before fieldwork begins
- Daily field QA with nightly uploads and mid-campaign plot adjustment capabilities
- Machine learning pipeline delivers per-tree species identification, above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation, and year-over-year growth tracking
- One 20-minute scan per 1-ha plot resolves forest structure, canopy height/density, understory condition, and restoration state from a single re-analyzable dataset
- Validation documents (PDDs, monitoring reports, safeguard reports) produced with a click-through trail to raw sensor data
- Permanent, re-analyzable data archive that scales from first plot to full project area