Yard Stick PBC, based in Cambridge, MA and led by CEO Chris Tolles, provides a soil carbon measurement solution combining proprietary hardware and software. Its technologies can measure soil organic carbon up to a metre in depth, create statistically sound sample plans, and collect measurement data in real time. The company says its approach reduces the cost of measurement by 70–90% and is compliant with voluntary carbon market crediting programs. Yard Stick reports solid sales traction, with multi-year contracts worth more than $17M in revenue and a pipeline that includes major players in soil markets. Fieldwork to date has covered many hundreds of thousands of acres across 26 US states. The company has raised nearly $18M in venture capital to date. Yard Stick is commercializing a soil spectroscopy technology into handheld hardware and a data platform to dramatically lower the cost of measuring soil carbon. The company says its technology will reduce measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) costs by more than 90% while improving analytical rigor versus current methods. Yard Stick is positioned as the soil carbon stock quantification partner for six USDA-selected projects and will provide low-cost, high-precision MRV to participating farmers and ranchers. The work aims to unlock economic opportunities for farmers to capture payments for verified soil carbon sequestration and to scale evidence-based climate-positive agriculture. Yard Stick’s R&D has been funded by an ARPA-E grant and by climate investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company’s stated mission is to enable gigaton-scale agricultural carbon sequestration through scalable, trustworthy measurement solutions.

Total raised

$19M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Nov 2023