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The co-founders, Luc Bettaieb and Martin de Stoppani (Photo by Khang Truong - @khangtrg)
Pre-seed funding led by Antler and Climate Leaders Fast Track, alongside grants from the European Space Agency and BPI France
Versant identifies land with high restoration potential to implement environmental projects that will drastically improve France’s biodiversity
Versant was founded by two founders with extensive experience in nature tech and software development
Paris, France - 15 Apr 2025: Versant, a French nature tech startup, has raised €500k in a first funding round.
Antler, the most active early-stage VC firm in the world, Climate Leaders Fast Track, a French impact fund, and a number of high-profile business angels participated in the round. In parallel, Versant has also secured grants from the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre and BPI France.
Biodiversity is collapsing around the world. In France alone, 25,000 hectares of land are artificialized every year: that's the equivalent of four football fields every hour.
Versant helps developers of essential infrastructure continue to build without destroying nature.
In France, infrastructure project developers face strong regulations to integrate biodiversity into the development of their projects. In order to build, these projects must assess their biodiversity impact and avoid and reduce as much of it as possible. Often, this is not enough, and a residual impact must be compensated for.
A compensation is a mandatory ecological restoration project that has to follow strict principles:
Compensation site identification still relies on very manual methods, creating delays for project developers, and rarely leading to an optimal choice for nature.
By aggregating and processing ecological and remote sensing data, the Versant team has built a deeptech solution to efficiently identify suitable land with high restoration potential.
Since the product launch in 2024, Versant is already working with some of the biggest renewable energy developers in France, including EDF Renouvelables, and has identified more than 50 hectares of land with high potential for ecological restoration.
The funding will be used to develop a more complete solution that helps renewable energy developers meet their environmental obligations more efficiently and proactively at every stage of a project.
Martin de Stoppani, co-founder and CEO of Versant, comments, “Our long-term goal is to build the go-to platform for any project developer to better manage their project’s ecological impact. We believe biodiversity can’t be an afterthought—it needs to be embedded more efficiently into the early decisions of every infrastructure project.”
"Versant is tackling a growing ecological and regulatory market with a highly innovative solution,” said Christoph Klink, Partner at Antler. “The founding team combines deep industry knowledge with high-quality technical expertise. Their pragmatic understanding of the challenges—paired with a genuine commitment to biodiversity—makes them uniquely positioned to transform how ecological impact is managed. We are delighted to have backed Versant from inception and have every confidence in their future success."