Pachama
Winter 2019AcquiredRestoring nature to solve climate change.
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Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
Restoring nature to solve climate change.
Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Pachama (W19).
Pachama tried to make forest carbon credits easier to trust and easier to buy. The company used satellite imagery, machine learning, project documents, and human review to assess whether forest projects were protecting or restoring land. It then sold credits from selected projects and later helped create new projects through Pachama Originals.
That combination attracted major corporate buyers and about $88 million in disclosed financing. It also placed two jobs with different incentives inside one company: judge project quality and sell approved inventory. When investigative reporting challenged forest-credit baselines in 2023, that tension became a public liability. The wider voluntary carbon market then contracted, corporate sustainability budgets tightened, and Pachama cut staff and retreated from project development. Carbon Direct acquired Pachama in November 2025, adding its forest-monitoring technology and part of its team to a larger climate advisory firm. The price and investor outcome remain undisclosed.
This was not a case of a product finding no use. Pachama moved money into forest projects, won recognized customers, and built measurement systems that a strategic buyer wanted. Its independent venture-scale path weakened when trust in the category fell and the company could not fully separate evidence from commerce.
Diego Saez Gil and Tomas Aftalion incorporated Pachama in October 2018 and entered Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch. Saez Gil had built travel and hardware companies; Aftalion brought experience in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and cloud systems. Aftalion first considered machine learning for agricultural insurance. After meeting Saez Gil, the pair focused on forests and carbon markets. A Carnegie Mellon profile describes the shift from that first concept to measuring forest carbon.
The mission took shape during an October retreat in California's Santa Cruz Mountains. Aftalion later wrote that they decided to restore nature as a response to climate change and chose a name derived from Pachamama, the Andean earth mother. Their early instinct was to perfect the technology. YC partner Michael Seibel pushed them toward a direct test: sell carbon credits immediately.
The advice shaped the company. Pachama did not begin as a remote-sensing vendor. It built a marketplace where measurement supported a transaction. Microsoft became an early major customer in 2020, followed by companies including Airbnb, Mercado Libre, Salesforce, Shopify, Netflix, and BCG, according to Aftalion's account.
The marketplace presented a selected inventory of forest credits. Behind it, Pachama reviewed project documents and used optical, infrared, radar, drone, and LiDAR-derived observations to estimate biomass, monitor forest loss, and test project claims. Remote sensing did not eliminate field measurement or registry verification. It made independent checks faster and gave buyers a common view across projects that otherwise arrived as PDFs and spreadsheets.
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons Pachama is still worth studying now.