Mast Reforestation Is Burying Burned Trees to Pay for New Forests

The math of a burned forest is simple, and brutal. A stand of timber that took a century to grow can be reduced to ash in an afternoon. The carbon it stored is released back into the atmosphere, and the landowner is left with a massive bill to replant. For years, the economics of restoration have been a bottleneck, leaving millions of acres to regenerate slowly, or not at all. Mast Reforestation is trying to change that equation by turning the entire process into a carbon removal project you can buy.

From its headquarters in Seattle, the company operates what it calls the largest private tree-seed bank in the western United States [Tacoma News Tribune]. It grows more than 30 million seedlings a year [mastreforest.com]. And, since a rebrand from its original name DroneSeed in 2023, it has stitched together a full-stack service: seed collection, nursery cultivation, site preparation, and planting, all financed by selling the future carbon removal credits the new forest will create [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. In February 2025, it added a new line item to the model: digging trenches to bury charred, unusable trees, preventing their decomposition and locking away their carbon for good [TechCrunch, February 2025]. It is a bet that the most reliable path to scaling reforestation is to make it an investable asset class.

The vertical integration play

Mast’s strategy is built on controlling the physical bottlenecks. The company began in 2016 as DroneSeed, focused on using drones to reseed burned areas from the air [TechCrunch, November 2018]. Its key evolution was the acquisition of two foundational forestry businesses: Silvaseed and Cal Forest Nurseries. Cal Forest alone supplies the majority of seedlings for reforestation across California and up to 30% of all seedlings planted in the Western U.S. [mastreforest.com]. This move gave Mast command over the scarce, climate-adapted seed supply and the production capacity needed to execute at scale. The model now looks less like a tech startup and more like an industrial logistics operator with a software and finance layer.

For a landowner,a timber company, a tribal nation, or a family forest,the proposition is straightforward. Mast handles the entire reforestation process at no upfront cost. In return, it retains the rights to the carbon removal credits generated as the new forest grows. The company then sells those credits to corporate buyers like Shopify, which purchased credits from Mast’s Henry Creek project in 2022 [Williston, December 2024], and TIME CO2 [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. The $15 million financing facility from Carbon Streaming Corp. in February 2024 provided project-level capital to advance this model [Gordian Knot Strategies, February 2024].

Why biomass burial changes the unit economics

The Series B round in February 2025, a $25 million raise co-led by Pulse Fund and Social Capital, was earmarked to scale the new biomass burial business [TechCrunch, February 2025]. This is where the model gets clever. After a severe fire, many trees are too damaged for timber but still hold carbon. Left to rot or burn again, that carbon is released. Mast’s solution is to bury them in engineered trenches, a process sometimes called "wood vaulting."

The first project targets the 2021 Poverty Flats Fire area in Montana, aiming to sequester more than 5,000 tonnes of burned trees [mastreforest.com]. This activity generates a separate stream of durable carbon removal credits, which can be sold alongside the reforestation credits. Critically, it also clears the land for replanting. The move turns a costly waste problem,deadwood removal,into a revenue-generating activity, improving the overall financial yield of a restoration project.

Traction and the team behind the bet

Founder and CEO Grant Canary has steered the company from a drone seeding experiment to a vertically integrated operator. The team has grown to include specialists like Jonathan Loevner, VP of Carbon Markets & Policy, who helps navigate the complex credit certification and offtake agreements [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. Headcount fluctuates with the season, from roughly 25 at headquarters to over 200 during peak nursery operations [Oxy Magazine, July 2025].

The company’s project pipeline demonstrates early market acceptance. Beyond the Henry Creek sale to Shopify, its Baccala Ranch project in California is expected to generate approximately 91,500 carbon credits [Carbon Streaming Corp. - PDF, February 2024]. The model has attracted a mix of venture and strategic capital, as shown in its funding history.

2021 Series A | 36 | M USD
2024 Project Finance | 15 | M USD
2025 Series B | 25 | M USD

The credibility hurdles

Mast’s bet rests on a few critical assumptions that will determine its long-term scale. The risks are not trivial, but the company has built specific moats to address them.

• Credit durability and pricing. The value of a forest carbon credit depends on the project’s ability to guarantee the carbon stays stored for 100 years or more. Mast sells credits for 200-year commitments [LinkedIn]. This requires rigorous monitoring, verification, and insurance against future fires or pests. A drop in voluntary carbon market prices or a loss of buyer confidence could squeeze margins.
• Execution at scale. Planting millions of trees across difficult terrain is a hard, manual business. Mast’s control of seed supply and nurseries mitigates one bottleneck, but field operations remain labor and weather-dependent. Scaling to millions of acres annually is a different order of magnitude.
• The biomass burial frontier. While scientifically sound, burying biomass for carbon removal is a newer methodology. Its acceptance by major credit registries and corporate buyers is still being proven. The Montana project serves as a crucial demonstration.

The company’s most plausible answer to these risks is its vertical integration. By owning the seed, the nursery, and the planting methodology, it controls more variables in the cost and quality chain than a pure project developer could.

The incumbent to beat

In the end, Mast Reforestation is not just competing with other reforestation startups like Flash Forest. Its real competition is the status quo of inaction. The incumbent is the conventional economics where a landowner looks at a blackened hillside, calculates the six-figure cost of replanting, and decides to wait for natural regeneration,a process that can take decades and often fails in today’s climate. Mast’s pitch is to make that decision a net-zero, or even net-positive, financial choice.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows the potential use. If its Baccala Ranch project sequesters 91,500 tonnes of CO2 as reported [Carbon Streaming Corp. - PDF], that’s equivalent to taking about 20,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year. The company’s reported capacity of 30 million seedlings annually, if all planted and grown, represents a carbon removal pipeline orders of magnitude larger. The unit that matters is dollars per tonne of durable carbon removed, and Mast is betting its integrated model can hit a price that buyers will pay and that still funds the work.

The next twelve months will be about proving the biomass burial model and scaling project deployments. If Mast can consistently turn burned acres into verified carbon assets, it won’t just be planting trees. It will be rewriting the balance sheet for an entire ecosystem.

Sources

1. [TechCrunch, February 2025] Mast Reforestation hatched a plan to restore wildfire-ravaged forests. Investors took notice. | https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/11/mast-reforestation-hatched-a-plan-to-restore-wildfire-ravaged-forests-investors-took-notice/
2. [mastreforest.com, retrieved 2026] Restoration for Resilience | https://www.mastreforest.com/
3. [Tacoma News Tribune, retrieved 2026] Mast operates the largest private tree-seed bank in the western United States | https://www.thenewstribune.com/
4. [Williston, December 2024] Up From the Ashes | https://www.williston.com/news/up-from-the-ashes/
5. [Gordian Knot Strategies, February 2024] Sliced: Seeds of Change, A Discussion With Mast Reforestation | https://gordianknotstrategies.com/2024/02/20/sliced%F0%9F%8E%99%EF%B8%8F-seeds-of-change-a-discussion-with-mast-reforestation/
6. [Carbon Streaming Corp. - PDF, February 2024] Baccala Ranch Reforestation Project details | https://carbonstreaming.com/
7. [Oxy Magazine, July 2025] Seeding the Forests | https://www.oxy.edu/magazine/issues/summer-2025/seeding-forests
8. [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief] Company overview and model description
9. [TechCrunch, November 2018] That night, a forest flew | https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/26/that-night-a-forest-flew-droneseed-is-planting-trees-from-the-air/
10. [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Mast Reforestation company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/mast-reforest