Earthshot Labs: Why This Climate Tech Founder Chose Infrastructure Over Products

Earthshot Labs: Why This Climate Tech Founder Chose Infrastructure Over Products

Carbon credit markets face a fundamental challenge: how do you direct massive capital flows toward conservation when the underlying infrastructure doesn’t exist? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Troy Carter shared why Earthshot Labs chose to build market infrastructure rather than simply selling carbon credits.

The Market Gap

“Our goal is around ecosystem restoration and conservation,” Troy explains. “How do we direct an order of magnitude larger amount of money towards the climate and ecological crisis? Everyone knows that’s what we need to do. And somehow, as a civilization, we haven’t quite gotten there.”

This gap between intention and execution led Troy to focus on infrastructure rather than products.

Building the Foundation

Earthshot’s infrastructure approach has three core components:

1. Project Development: “It’s quite complicated for a project to go through the process of having a scoping and feasibility study and writing a project design document and then getting registered by Vera or another regulatory agency.”
2. Investment Infrastructure: Troy notes that “ordinary people can’t do that. Right. And even institutional investors don’t necessarily understand how to do due diligence on these projects to actually understand, well, how do I get a market rate return on something that’s still a bit of a speculative asset class.”
3. Risk Assessment Tools: They developed sophisticated ecosystem forecasting capabilities to ask “what happens to this piece of land in the next 30 or 50 years? How will trees grow? How will weather patterns change to reflect aridity or species suitability for that site?”

From Theory to Practice

Their Panama project demonstrates this infrastructure in action. Troy describes “a 10,000 hectare reforestation project… about a $26 million implementation cost over six years.” The project showcases how their infrastructure enables complex transactions between farmers, investors, and carbon buyers.

Scaling Through Infrastructure

Rather than focusing on individual projects, Earthshot’s infrastructure approach allows them to scale impact. They’re currently working on “one to two dozen” similar projects, while providing “carbon development services to many more projects.”

This infrastructure-first strategy also shapes their revenue model. Troy explains they earn through “taking a commission on those investments and taking a credit share in those projects so that our incentives are aligned and in some cases, just getting paid for carbon development services.”

Meeting Market Needs

The strategy addresses several critical market needs:

1. Scientific Credibility: “The carbon market has gone through a bit of a reckoning recently where there’s been a lot of press around the lack of rigor in scientific standards.”
2. Local Agency: Working with communities like “the Shipibo communities, to do conservation, where they approached us because they wanted a partner that was really integrity with their values.”
3. Investment Access: Creating vehicles so “normal people [can] invest with their pensions and 401k in a security that actually directly catalyzes project development in nature restoration.”

Looking Ahead

This infrastructure-first approach positions Earthshot to achieve ambitious goals: enabling “the planting of more than a billion trees, more than 50 million hectares under conservation, and more than 100 million tons of CO2 drawn down from the atmosphere” by 2030.

For B2B founders considering product versus infrastructure plays, Earthshot’s journey offers valuable insights. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t in building another product, but in creating the infrastructure that enables an entire market to function effectively.

Success in such ventures requires patient capital, deep technical expertise, and a willingness to solve complex, systemic challenges rather than chase quick wins. But as Earthshot demonstrates, the potential impact—and returns—can be orders of magnitude larger than traditional product-focused approaches.