Company: Foros
Website: https://www.foros.com/
CEO: Justas Kaveckas
About Foros
Stemming from the Latin word for forum, Foros is the digital, global forum where people come together to invest in, manage, and protect forests. 30% of the land on earth is forest land. About 10% of this portion needs to be protected as wilderness or sacred parks because of their uniqueness, beauty, and biodiversity. But the other 90% of forest lands need to be protected through active management. Foros is the platform that brings our world’s forests online. We need to get visibility and awareness of what we have, and then we need to figure out the best management strategy for every piece of forest in the world.
Foros makes it easy for people to invest in forests and to maximise the ability of forests to do what they do best. They are forest conservationists, meaning that Foros forests will remain as forest lands in perpetuity and not be converted to any other use. They are active managers of the forests that are on their platform, and all of their forests are managed under FSC regulations. Managed forests are better at maximising carbon sequestration, turning over timber for sustainable building, reducing wildfires, and generating profit. It’s just like a house that you inherit: if you do nothing to manage the property, in fifty years you will have a pile of bricks and nothing else.
Right now, forests are basically where the stock market was 100 years ago, but the revolution in forest investment is not going to take 100 years like it did with stocks. Foros is going to bring a new level of awareness and investment to forests. This will also result in a tremendous transformation in the amount and variety of liquidity for these markets. New money is going to come flooding in, and they can get enterprises buying into this idea. The end result is carbon sequestration. Properly managed forests sequester carbon at least twice as well as unmanaged forests, and they produce at least twice the amount of timber. This is a virtuous cycle where profit leads to sustainability which leads to more profits and so on.
There are other companies doing forest auctions and forest investments, and there are plenty of companies planting trees and making claims on carbon sequestration. But no other player in this space is combining technology with forestry experience and finance and investment expertise like Foros. By utilising data science, predictive modeling, cutting edge Lidar survey technology, and AI, Foros aims to be the global platform for forestry investment, bringing more awareness, interest, investments, regulation, and control to our world’s forests than has ever been previously possible.
