Red River Insights - Nature & Biodiversity top10
What happens when nature stops being an externality.
As the year comes to a close, we wanted to share a quick update from the team.
2025 has been a strong year for the fund, marked by the arrival of three new team members, Bettina, Alessandro, and Thomas, and six new investments, including:
Okeiro, Veesion, and HyPrSpace: three exceptional French companies in sectors we know particularly well: Healthtech, Computer vision, and Spacetech.
The first investments of our new fund, >commit. You may have already heard about >commit; if not, and if you’re building or closely following open-source technologies, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our final deal of the year, which we’ve just closed this week and consider exceptional in many ways. While we can’t share more details yet, we’ll be announcing it in January.
Thank you for following along this year. We wish you a wonderful holiday season and look forward to reconnecting in the new year, with more content and even more data-driven insights.
Warm regards,
The Red River West team
Now come the monthly data driven insights you’ve all been waiting for…
Red River Insights - December 2025
Dear friends,
In February, three rare freshwater mussel species were identified in the Seine, right in the heart of Paris.
A simple local anecdote? Not at all.
This discovery was made possible through environmental DNA analysis, a technology that allows scientists to detect species without disturbing ecosystems or relying on chance observation.
What this really signals is a deeper shift: we are moving from biodiversity protection to biodiversity integration.
For decades, biodiversity protection meant reacting after the fact: measuring damage once infrastructure was built, or compensating impacts elsewhere. Too often, technological and industrial development has come at the expense of ecosystems, accelerating biodiversity loss rather than accounting for it.
Biodiversity integration is different. It acknowledges that technology can be both part of the problem and part of the solution, and intentionally reframes how infrastructure is designed, operated, and financed, with nature in mind from day one. This relies on continuous, non-invasive monitoring to adapt in real time, rather than repairing damage after it occurs.
The emerging tech stack reflects this transition:
Environmental DNA, computer vision, and acoustic sensing replacing manual field surveys
Continuous ecosystem monitoring embedded directly into assets
New verification and reporting standards proving real, durable ecological impact
RAMP's Nature & Biodiversity tech top10
We hope this sparks interesting conversations. If you have any comments or would like to suggest a startup that should be included, feel free to reach out to us. Joseph, Chloé and Olivier will be delighted to discuss these trends and rankings.
(Ranking established on 17/12/2025)
We’ve highlighted 5 key trends illustrated by these companies:
1. Measuring nature
Making biodiversity and ecosystems observable at scale, without disturbing them.
For decades, biodiversity monitoring relied on manual fieldwork, visual observation, and infrequent surveys. This made it expensive, slow, and incomplete. A new generation of technologies now enables continuous, non-invasive detection of species and ecosystem signals, even in complex or urban environments.
By shifting from episodic observation to persistent sensing, these tools allow biodiversity to be tracked over time, not just assessed once.
Spoor uses AI-powered computer vision to monitor bird populations around wind farms in real time.
Spygen detects aquatic and terrestrial species through environmental DNA, revealing biodiversity that would otherwise remain invisible.
2. Making sense of nature
Turning complex ecological signals into decision-ready insights for businesses and investors.
Raw biodiversity data is not enough. Companies and investors need to understand how ecosystems relate to assets, operations, supply chains, and long-term risk. This category sits between measurement and action, translating environmental signals into strategic context.
These platforms help organizations move from awareness to informed decision-making.
Hula Earth collects raw nature data (soil, water, biodiversity) using sensors + satellites, and turns it into metrics investors can use to evaluate nature-based assets (farmland, forests, restoration projects).
Nala Earth maps a company’s sites and supply chains, overlays them with environmental data (biodiversity, water stress, deforestation), and flags where the company is exposed to nature-related risk or regulation.
Darwin quantifies how a company affects biodiversity (and depends on it) using models and datasets, then translates that into decision metrics for strategy, investment, or reporting.
3. Fixing & regenerating ecosystems
Going beyond damage limitation to actively restoring natural systems.
Biodiversity protection alone is no longer sufficient. Climate change, land degradation, and industrial pressure require regenerative approaches that improve ecosystem health while supporting economic activity. This trend focuses on rebuilding natural capital rather than merely preserving what remains.
Ocean Ecostructures installs artificial reef modules on existing marine infrastructure (ports, offshore assets) to create real marine habitats, then measures the biodiversity gains with sensors and monitoring tools.
Klim enables farmers to adopt regenerative practices (cover crops, reduced tillage, crop rotation), measures improvements in soil carbon and biodiversity, and allows companies to fund and report these gains across their agricultural supply chains.
4. Proving impact
Ensuring nature projects deliver real, verifiable outcomes.
As capital flows into biodiversity and nature-based solutions, trust becomes critical. This category focuses on verification, standards, and transparency, ensuring that ecological impact is real, measurable, and durable.
Equitable Earth (previously ERS) provides a global MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) and certification framework for conservation and ecosystem restoration projects, verifying climate, biodiversity, and social outcomes so they can be credibly financed through carbon and nature markets.
Earthly curates and monitors high-integrity nature-based projects using scientific criteria and satellite data, giving companies confidence that funded projects deliver real, tracked environmental and community impact.
5. Producing with nature
Redesigning industrial production to work with biological systems rather than against them.
Beyond conservation and restoration, a growing set of startups is rethinking how products are made. By using biotechnology and biological processes, they aim to replace extractive and petrochemical supply chains with nature-aligned production systems. This is where biodiversity meets industrial transformation.
Insempra uses precision fermentation to produce natural, high-performance ingredients for beauty, food, and fashion, enabling brands to replace fossil-based or land-intensive inputs with scalable bio-manufactured alternatives.
More on RAMP's scoring method
The ranking of these startups is based on the estimated momentum of the company, but the algorithm does not assess the quality or reliability of the products/solutions developed by these companies!
Find out about the algorithm behind this ranking and the way scores are calculated here: Cheat sheet on RAMP
In case you missed them, our latest top 10s are here: Digital Biology (November25), Women-founded startups (October25), Industry autonomy (September25) Advanced Materials (July25), Quantum (June25), Spanish tech (May25) Sport Tech (April 25), HR Tech (March25)
All the previous Top 10 are here.
Portfolio news:
Le Collectionist has been selected by Condé Nast Traveller as one of the top travel specialists to know right now.
Worldia launched its new platform, featuring a redesigned, more intuitive interface that simplifies travel planning. The update brings direct access to key tools and an AI assistant to create tailor-made trips more efficiently. Worldia also announced the opening of a new office in Mérida, marking its third location alongside Paris and Berlin.
At HLTH 2025, Jacob Plummer shared how Ada Health is leveraging AI as a “resident physician in an AI format” to tackle system-level healthcare challenges. Watch the video to hear how AI can scale clinical capacity, better prepare patients, and extend health systems from regional to global reach.
The Exploration Company has been awarded a Consolidation Phase contract by the ESA for the InSPoC-1 Phase B2 program. This milestone strengthens the development of Nyx and Europe’s sovereign space logistics, ahead of an in-orbit demonstration planned for 2028.
Veesion was featured in the 2025 mapping of French retail startups by France Digitale and FDJ UNITED Ventures.
Sifted featured Otera among the top 16 AI workflow automation startups to watch.
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