Pina Earth
Winter 2022AcquiredUnlocking carbon markets for European forest owners
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Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
Unlocking carbon markets for European forest owners
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 Pina Earth (W22).
Pina Earth turned European forest adaptation into a carbon-market product. Founded in Munich in 2021, the company built digital twins, climate simulations, certification workflows, and buyer dashboards so forest owners could finance the conversion of vulnerable monocultures into mixed forests.[1]
Its July 2025 exit took the form of a merger with Tree.ly. Pina Earth had proved the method, raised seed capital, certified projects, and won corporate customers. Yet forest carbon remained a business of local standards, costly project work, scarce supply, and buyer trust. The deal added geographies, methodologies, and distribution that neither platform had alone. The combined company kept the Pina Earth brand, while Tree.ly's founders took operational control and Pina Earth's founders became advisers.[2]
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Gesa Biermann came to climate technology through environmental research. She studied Sustainable Resource Management at the Technical University of Munich, worked briefly in strategy consulting, joined the management team at the Center for Digital Technology and Management, and completed an LMU doctorate on sustainable food systems. She met software engineer Florian Fincke at CDTM in 2017. Jonas Kerber, whose background spanned robotics and ecosystem modeling, joined them as the third co-founder and CTO.[3]
The team did not begin with a forest-carbon epiphany. Biermann said the founders mapped roughly 150 social and environmental problems, then used design sprints and interviews to test whether each problem was real. They conducted more than 100 early interviews before choosing carbon markets. Those interviews exposed the opening. Forests needed expensive adaptation, but smaller owners could not justify the cost or navigate carbon certification. Biermann described the product plainly to TechCrunch: “Essentially we’re building an online platform where we’re connecting forest owners and carbon credit buyers.” She added, “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for forest owners to be rewarded for the ecosystem services they provide.”[1]
The founders also made a specific ecological choice. Instead of paying only to plant trees or stop logging, they focused on converting commercially managed monocultures into forests with more species and age diversity. That fit Germany, where land for new forests is limited and timber remains economically important. The resulting carbon credits paid for interventions now whose benefits would accumulate over decades.
Pina Earth joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch.[4] Kerber left the company after 2022 and began a doctorate at TUM in 2023; public materials do not explain his ownership or the terms of that departure.[5] Biermann and Fincke continued to lead the company through the merger.
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons Pina Earth is still worth studying now.