Due to the laborious, time-intensive, and expensive nature of soil testing, farmers typically only sample their soil once every four years. Perennial (formally Cloud Agronomics) leverages machine learning, ground observations, and remote-sensing to measure and map soil carbon and land-based emissions at continent-level scales, providing innovative best practices to assess and predict global agricultural production health.

They reached a significant milestone in 2002 by raising $18M in Series A funding, which brought their total funding amount to $35M. Its product that measures the amount of carbon in global farmland soils was also recently selected by the United Nations as one of the Top 100 Global Projects using AI to solve UN Sustainable Development Goals. TIME magazine named Perennial’s soil-based carbon removal verification platform a Best Invention of 2022, read the feature here. 

Perennial was founded by Brown alumni Alex Zhuk ’20, Jack Roswell ’20, and David Schurman ’20.