There’s a glaring blindspot in under pressure global supply chains: the first mile. This crucial but still opaque area – the point of origin for raw materials – is where around 60% of volatility and risk originates. Yet many businesses still have limited visibility and a lack of data into this critical part of their value chain, even as it faces growing strain from evolving regulatory and compliance demands, resource availability and climate change.
These challenges are particularly hard felt in the first mile of nature-based commodity supply chains, where extreme weather conditions, land degradation, strained water sources and operational inefficiencies have far-ranging consequences for businesses and their customers.
Only recently have major international brands, from food and beverage giants like Starbucks and Mondelez International through to tyre manufacturers like Bridgestone and Michelin, been forced to shift their supply chain strategies after facing reduced yields, failing crops, constrained supply and rising costs in the first mile.
Critically, first mile disruption doesn’t stop there. It cascades through businesses and their networks, impacting everything from production timelines and shipments through to financing and investment decisions, contractual obligations and the ability to validate ESG and responsible sourcing claims.
The challenge, according to Treefera Co-Founders Caroline Grey and Jonathan Horn, is a lack of defensible, real-time data from the complex first mile, fragmented documentation and a historically heavy reliance on manual data capture.
“There’s been huge investment in the last mile of supply chains and a significant focus on aggregating data across the middle mile, meaning we understand those areas quite well,” says Caroline, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at the London-based startup. “By contrast, the first mile has been relatively untouched largely because the technology to accurately capture data around sourcing, risk and compliance just hasn’t been there.”
“Our world runs on nature-based commodities, yet information on the physical source of these assets remains largely invisible to the systems that depend on them,” adds Founder and CEO Jonathan. “Risk and volatility are increasing and supply chains are less predictable in a world being driven by temperature change. Nature-based assets like coffee, cacao, palm oil or rubber are profoundly affected by that.
“Sourcing is less resilient and healthy, requiring a far greater need for forecasting and scenario modelling, and there are increasing compliance requirements including regulations like the EU Deforestation Regulations (EUDR),” he says. “Companies and investors are compelled to clearly understand where products in their supply chain come from, making the need to get primary data from the first mile a commercial imperative – there’s no longer any choice.”
Technology, experience and passion for change
Caroline and Jonathan founded Treefera in 2022 to mitigate this challenge, driven in equal measure by inspiration from successful careers across technology, climate tech and finance, and a personal desire to harness innovative technologies to make a meaningful difference.
The company combines satellite imagery, adaptive AI and financial-grade risk modelling into a ‘data fabric’ – an integrated network that turns messy or fragmented data into structured, real-time insights that bring visibility and actionable intelligence to the first mile. Its platform provides specific solutions for risk, compliance and sourcing.
Both Jonathan and Caroline have significant experience that has helped speed Treefera’s exceptionally fast growth – moving from its founding in 2022 rapidly through pre-seed, Series A and Series B funding rounds, the latter taking place in June 2025 and raising US$30m.
“The challenges facing supply chains, particularly the first mile, created a perfect storm for an opportunity like Treefera,” says Caroline, who has worked at several technology firms over her career in a go-to-market capacity, including at RPA leader UiPath during its period of hyperscale growth.
The pair bootstrapped Treefera, building a highly capable team across engineering, science and go-to-market activities. “It’s been a really short period of time, including heavy investment in technology, science and R&D, as well as working closely with customers to build a solution that really meets the needs of the market,” Caroline reflects.
“By the time of our seed round we’d just signed a contract worth around £400,000 (US$540,600). Our Series A round was only seven months after and, between that and our recent Series B, we’d grown by about 600%.”
The genesis for Treefera came to Jonathan during his previous work in investment banking, including at J.P. Morgan, an environment where there is no room for ambiguity and risk, and precision and decision making at scale underpinned by strong data are essential.
“While working on how we could create better data sets on nature-based assets on the first mile of commodity supply chains, I found it incredibly difficult to get the data in a form that could be ingested, processed and actionable,” he says. “I saw a clear opportunity to bring the same quantitative discipline and modelling frameworks used in finance to the natural world and build a platform that enables forecasting, pricing and portfolio-level decision making based on real world environmental and carbon risk.”
AI-enabled first mile revolution
Treefera’s platform is based on a clear premise: clear data drives clear decisioning. It is robust, flexible and industry agnostic, providing packaged and configurable solutions for sourcing, risk mitigation and compliance. It has already supported enterprises across the energy, agriculture, insurance, pharmaceuticals and forestry industries, as well as global professionals services.
The unmatched visibility it provides into the origin, flow and health of critical commodities helps these kinds or organisations to improve supply chain integrity, enable faster project validation and meet increasingly stringent ESG and sustainability ambitions.
Treefera uses agentic AI technology combined with satellite, drone and ground data to deliver plot-level insight efficiently and effectively, and to a highly detailed level – modern satellites can, for example, reveal critical yet highly-focused details like soil composition and erosion, or monitor forest compliance.
“By bringing together the enormous acceleration in AI and satellite capabilities that has happened in recent years, we’re able to observe things at the first mile that were inconceivable even three to five years ago,” says Jonathan. “In order to build any kind of assessment of risk, you have to know what the ‘now’ is – that means all sourcing capabilities and the health and condition of the location.
“Around 20% of that has previously been unknown, but with AI and satellite data you can now process millions of images going back 10 or 15 years to discover a specific patch of any nature-based commodity,” he says. “With that information to hand we can use specific AI algorithms to model anything from soil organic carbon or deforestation to water stress, weather or climate data to build a detailed picture of resilience in the location.”
Treefera’s proprietary flexible data fabric underpins this capability. Acting as a central nervous system, it brings together disparate data sources into a cohesive system that transforms raw data into a context-rich analytics.
“It’s game-changing,” says Caroline. “It’s strong and robust, meaning we can configure, move, and work quickly and flexibly. On top of that we’ve been able to build our solutions for sourcing, risk and compliance. It shifts the dial from an environment where companies were relying on predictive or forecasting data and aggregated metrics, to a place where they have a far higher level of accuracy because of first mile data, and can make more sound business decisions that accelerate strategic goals.”
Sourcing, risk and compliance
Customers use Treefera to manage and monitor commodities and carbon across three key areas. For sourcing, the platform unlocks supply chain transparency at the source, leveraging high-fidelity and multi-layered data for plot-level accuracy. It also allows for near-time analysis on Tier 3 sites to make more informed, smarter investment decisions and drive the flow of capital.
“One of our clients recently made a US$8bn investment in land in Eastern Europe,” says Caroline. “That level of investment typically involves evaluating in the region of 50 sites, including people visiting to collect and collate data. Working with us, a customer just has to give us pins of the locations and, within minutes, we provide a full assessment to inform the investment decision making. That’s a significant ROI difference.”
Better data at first mile unlocks financial value in other ways, including through improved crop yields as a result of the ability to select the best growing locations, and to proactively manage land and land use to make supply chains more resilient. “The same client that made the US$8m investment was able to accurately predict that the supply would only be available for eight years, rather than typical estimates of 40 or 50 years, which adds huge value,” Caroline adds.
Building in this level of scalable resilience is a foundational element of Treefera’s risk solution, which harnesses AI-powered insights for proactive identification of risk factors. Customers can apply financial-grade risk modelling and trading across their supply chain, monitor Scope 3 exposure and access fully transparent and auditable data sets.
To meet increasing regulatory and compliance requirements, Treefera’s platform provides real-time, reliable data for end-to-end oversight for businesses of all sizes. It also enables multi-tiered insights aligned with specific compliance frameworks and continuously updates pipelines in order to stay up to date with evolving standards.
“We give people the confidence they need to reduce risk to supply, reduce exposure to fines and make their business more robust,” says Caroline. “That’s true for any number of areas, from government stakeholders and landowners looking to reduce deforestation and protect land or large internationals like Nestle needing to know the ingredients they’re sourcing are compliant with local regulations, through to carbon project developers needing to develop compliant projects.”
Jonathan points to more effective supplier management – critical in large-scale, global supply chains – as another advantage of better first mile data. “Good data lets you ensure your suppliers are adhering to best practices and the relevant regulatory processes, rewarding those that are. We’re really driving the far more effective strategic management of the overall supply chain by data.”
