Use of Funds, Runway & Roadmap
The pre-seed buys the start of the build. This section sets out what the money does and what gets constructed each year to stand the platform up. The commercial sequence — how the products are sold and in what order — is in Go-to-Market; this is the build behind it.
What the pre-seed buys
The $600,000 funds an eight-month sprint with a single goal, the first signed paying contract (GATE 0), which is the event that re-rates the company. It is not operating burn; it is de-risking capital that converts a pre-revenue story into a proven-revenue one.
| Use | Amount | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| ROOT MVP pilot (50 sensor nodes, one drone campaign, eDNA) | $170,000 | three months of field work producing live data, the product proof for GATE 0 |
| First paying customer + 2–3 paid letters of intent | $90,000 | pre-revenue to proven revenue, the single biggest re-rate |
| Frontend prototype / investor demo | $70,000 | a seed-ready demonstration of how the data displays |
| Core team (CEO, CFO, CSO, PR, technical lead, business development) + buffer | $182,000 | the eight-month operating team; most senior pay accrues as founder-loan debt, not cash |
| Legal: data-firewall entity, founder-loan agreement, FPIC start | $54,000 | a conflict-free structure that unlocks catalytic capital |
| Grant applications (GCF, PROFONANPE, IDB via TERI) and Article 6.2 | $34,000 | secures the non-dilutive funding backbone |
| Total | $600,000 |
The senior team takes a small cash stipend during the sprint; the balance of market salary accrues as debt repaid from the raise, which is why $600,000 covers a full team for eight months. FPIC is free, prior and informed consent from the communities on the land.
The build, year by year
ROOT is a build, not a finished asset, and the schedule is sequenced so the cheapest infrastructure ships first. The lead product needs the drones, the sensor nodes and the environmental-DNA sampling, but it does not need the flux towers, so the towers — the single most expensive item — are deferred to the year the data license actually requires them. Each year stands up a specific layer and clears the construction or audit gate that lets the next layer begin.
| Year | What gets built | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| 2027 | Data-fusion platform fully operational; biological reference and external libraries to ~50%; research campus near Iquitos (20 staff); the 90,000-hectare pilot concession fully equipped with sensors, sample plots and community consent; the eDNA laboratory built and permitted; the first LiDAR drone fleet bought and certified. Flux towers only sited and permitted (~10% of cost), not installed. | Data-title legal opinion in hand; all eDNA permits granted. |
| 2028 | Both eddy-covariance flux towers installed (terra firme and floodplain); reference libraries completed; 4,500 voucher samples collected and genetically barcoded; coverage expanded by 250,000 hectares. | Flux towers commissioned; independent verifier (VVB) accepts the monitoring output. |
| 2029 | The AI models and the digital twin of the forest completed; the eDNA reference library expanded to 16,000 species; coverage expanded by a further 650,000 hectares. | Digital-twin calibration complete; benefit-sharing (ABS) agreements in place. |
| 2030 | Final calibration and steady-state operation; no major new build. | EBITDA-positive; IFRS financial-audit sign-off. |
| 2031+ | The platform replicated across new jurisdictions at marginal field cost only. | Each signed jurisdictional cluster extends coverage; this is what turns the fixed build into widening margin. |
The point of the schedule is the deferral. The flux towers — an eddy-covariance pair that directly measures the carbon the forest exchanges with the air — are the costliest piece of ROOT, and they are not needed for the lead product. Building the cheap, grant-funded jurisdictional product first, and adding the expensive ground-truth only when the data license needs it, is what keeps the early capital small.
The honest read
This is a build plan for a system that does not exist yet, and every stage is gated. The data license and monitoring service depend on the flux towers being commissioned and an independent verifier accepting the output; the full suite depends on the digital twin calibrating and the benefit-sharing agreements being signed; profitability depends on reaching steady state and passing the IFRS audit. The whole schedule rests on the first signed contract, GATE 0, which the pre-seed exists to reach. Every figure here is a management estimate, and the revenue the build supports (set out in Financials) is gated on execution, not a forecast.