Reseed’s Pivot Playbook: How Their Carbon Credit Platform Went from 0 to 10,000 Farmers

Most climate tech startups chase complex technological solutions. Reseed took a different approach: focusing on farmers as the key to scaling carbon credit markets.

When Josh Knauer launched Reseed, he identified a striking market inefficiency: “less than 1%, in fact, it’s 0.03% of carbon credits on the market today come from farming or agriculture in any form.” With 600 million family farms worldwide, this gap represented both a massive opportunity and a significant scaling challenge.

Finding the Right Entry Point Instead of targeting large industrial farms, Reseed focused on family farms in regions critical to climate change. “Those same farms are the place where 80% of the world’s deforestation is taking place,” Josh explains. This strategic focus allowed Reseed to address both environmental impact and market opportunity.

Building Trust Through Data Reseed’s platform success hinged on creating transparent, verifiable standards. “We are literally the first company in the world to create a carbon credit measuring protocol for active agricultural land in very small places,” Josh notes. This focus on measurement and verification helped establish credibility in a market often criticized for lack of transparency.

Expanding Beyond Carbon Credits Rather than limiting themselves to carbon credits, Reseed developed multiple revenue streams from farmer data. “We’re marketing actually a bunch of different data products from different farmers to markets. Think supply chain information, think the EU has a deforestation regulation that’s taking the world by storms,” Josh explains. This diversification made the platform more valuable to both farmers and corporate buyers.

Scaling Through Regional Expansion The company’s growth strategy focuses on geographic expansion while maintaining local relevance. “We’re launching in about twelve countries this year,” Josh shares. This rapid expansion is possible because Reseed built their platform to accommodate different farming practices and regional regulations from the start.

Future Growth Plans Reseed’s current network of “well over 10,000 farmers” is just the beginning. “Our goal within a year or two is to be working with tens of millions of farmers,” Josh states. This ambitious scaling plan is supported by growing market demand for verified carbon credits and supply chain transparency.

The Technology Component Unlike many climate tech companies that lead with complex solutions, Reseed emphasizes practical tools that farmers can easily adopt. They provide farmers with “an app that we provide to them, and turning that data into carbon credits and other products that corporations and governments and individuals need in order to achieve climate goals.”

For B2B tech founders, Reseed’s journey offers valuable lessons about scaling in emerging markets. Their success shows how focusing on user needs and building trust through verification can help create and dominate new market categories. As Josh puts it, “We need to have access to the data, you need to have auditability, you need to have verification, and you need to have transparency in the process.”