Yard Stick PBC

Hey there! We’re proud to announce our $10.6M Series A led by Toyota Ventures Climate Fund with participation from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Pillar VC, and an extended group of climate-committed founders, angels, and family offices: https://lnkd.in/eF4nd9tC We’re biased, but we think measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) in soil carbon is kinda the most important thing to get right. To that end, we’ve spent nearly 3 years in R&D to ensure our spectral soil carbon measurement technology can go the distance. TLDR: It can! 🎉 This round represents our transition from a primary focus on R&D to deploy, deploy, deploy. While we will always have awesome new tech on our roadmap (look out for a 1 m probe, inorganic carbon MRV, and forestry work before long!), the core of our VisNIR spectroscopy platform is ready to go the distance. Critically, we’re not alone in this assessment. Recent consensus on the readiness of soil spectroscopy for carbon has been super-encouraging. For one example, see Verra’s just-published revision to their flagship soil carbon protocol, VM0042, which for the first time now allows spectroscopy for soil C MRV instead of laboratory analysis. We’ve known for some time that we’re working on the right problem, but to see others agree that we’re working with the right technology is massively encouraging. Please reach out if you need soil carbon measured! We’d love to show you what we’ve got, and we’re likely already in your neighborhood. 👋

Talk is cheap! Publishing in the world’s top soil science journal is something else. 😎 We’re immensely proud to announce our recent publication in Geoderma alongside our long-time collaborators and advisors at the Soil Health Institute: https://lnkd.in/eAsBt_-B Of course, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants - spectroscopy for SOC is by now a multi-decadal discipline. We didn’t make this stuff up! Nonetheless, we believe we’re the only commercially-deployed in situ spectroscopy solution for SOC stock quantification in the world. Soil C MRV has been a hot hot topic in recent years, and rightly so! But that means there’s a lot of nonsense out there. With appreciation towards earlier-stage technologies trying to do the same thing as Yard Stick, we think we’re doing this “the right way” with a peer-reviewed publication in a top-shelf journal. A solution which can’t show its work or stand up to expert peer-review is no solution indeed. Yard Stick was founded because “what gets measured gets managed.” We’ve mismanaged SOC stocks for decades, with predictable, and terrible, results. Sadly, this issues will only continue unless we realign incentives. The single best indicator of soil health is soil organic carbon, so whether you care about food security (= national security!), emissions reductions, carbon removal, resilient supply chains, thriving rural economies, ecological conservation and restoration, or the intrinsic beauty and pleasure of natural systems… soil carbon is critical-path. If you’re working in agricultural systems, appreciate our commitment to scientific rigor, and would like to learn more about the low-cost approach to soil C MRV in our Geoderma article can happen on YOUR program’s land, please share your information at the link in comments - we’d love to chat!

True Story: Microsoft is the single most sophisticated soil carbon buyer on the planet. They have a front-row seat to the most compelling suppliers and enabling technologies in soil carbon solutions - they've got their pick! Which is why Yard Stick is so proud to be a Microsoft Climate Investment Fund portfolio company. Thank you for the feature, Microsoft + CIF team! 👋

🚨 Three new urgent roles at Yard Stick, details below! Please share far and wide! 🚨 🪚 We need a full-time Senior Mechanical Engineer! This hybrid SF Bay-based role will work 2-3 days/week out of our Oakland, CA hardware lab. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of shipping hardware that works, feels at home both in CAD and at a workbench, and loves diving into sensor data from the field. Expected salary is $150-200k/year. Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/ewrpxgqF 💾 We need a full-time Embedded / Full Stack Software Engineer! This hybrid SF Bay-based role will work 2-3 days/week out of our Oakland, CA hardware lab. The ideal candidate knows how to write software that makes hardware go, as well as pipe, process, and interpret the data that comes from it. Expected salary is $180-200k/year/year. Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/ed3HciSZ 💰 We need a full-time Director of Business Development! This remote role can work US time zone work hours from wherever they please with a strong priority for US-based team members. The ideal candidate has experience selling big, complex service contracts of in the hundreds of $k to low $Ms range and possesses innate customer discovery/customer development curiosity to inform commercial strategy. Expected salary is $170-250k/year. Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/eY_Z5sm4

Thank you Matt Gordon and Climate Tech Action Network for including Yard Stick in your upcoming program! If you're the Bay Area and want to chat ag + climate, please join us on Nov 21 at 6PM at Monument House - details below. Our incredible Head of Hardware, Dalton Colen, will be speaking alongside our friends Maddie of Living Carbon and Alex of Alga Biosciences. Hope to see you there! 👋

#soilscience friends, we're hosting a happy hour next week at #ACSMtg 2024 in San Antonio! If you're attending SSSA Annual Meeting and are into soil C MRV, soil spectroscopy, or similar topics, we'd love to buy you a beer/etc on Monday evening. DM for details! 👋

🎉 If you care about nature, technology, and climate - check out this great report from Nature4Climate, Nature Tech Collective , KPMG, Climate Collective, and Serena. This report summarizes advancements in tech to help boost nature and help nature boost us over the past year. 🙏 Thank you to the organizing team for the highlight of Indigo as a leader in the space and our work with Yard Stick PBC. Our pilot together shows the great strides that team has made on getting in-field soil measurements a reality that can help soil carbon projects scale even further. 👋 This broader ecosystem of solutions get's stronger when we work! If you've got great tech to help soil carbon as a solution get better, faster, or cheaper - send me a note and let's chat!

Flattered to be included in this excellent report from Microsoft alongside our friends at Vibrant Planet and Farmland LP! As goes nature, so goes most of what we love about planet Earth. Many thanks to Erika, Amy, and so many other folks on Team Nature™ at Microsoft. Microsoft has a rare and inspiring vision for the messy, living, biological, "natural" reality of the climate challenge... including soils. We're so grateful to be part of the portfolio. 🤝

Yard Stick is honored to be included in this report - many thanks to the authors. Real climate impact and durable soil C project development economics are only possible with low-cost, high-rigor quantification of soil C stocks and stock changes. That's what we do! 😎 Check out pages 40-41 for our micro case study with Indigo on spectroscopy for SOC MRV. Please reach out if you'd like more technical detail on this effort and our other spectral SOC MRV successes around the world. 👋

We're hiring! 🥳 Yard Stick is looking for a Soil Scientist with a background in pedometrics and strong experience in proximal sensing and/or spectroscopy. This role will work with our product teams (software, hardware, data science) designing experiments, gathering and analyzing data, and helping shape the direction of our soil carbon measurement offering. Our technology uses spectral imaging and machine learning to measure organic soil carbon, bringing down the cost of soil measurement and creating incentives for better soil management and soil carbon removal. We are a small team distributed around the US and this role will be massively influential on Yard Stick... and on the climate. 🌎 Market salary and equity commensurate with expertise. Directionally, we expect salary in the range of $135-175k. Please share with your network! And learn more and apply here: https://lnkd.in/eGiA3egb