HELSINKI, Finland (September 19, 2019) – Tech company CollectiveCrunch has launched its ground-breaking forestry AI platform Linda Forest for commercial use.
The launch took place at the Digital Excellence Forum, an EU event on digitalization, held in Helsinki on September 19, 2019.
“Digital Excellence Forum is about digitalization and its forerunners in every industry. It felt like a natural place for us to launch the leading AI product in forest inventories and the digitalization of the forestry industry,” CollectiveCrunch”s CEO and Co-founder Rolf Schmitz says, speaking at the event.
CollectiveCrunch is an AI leader in the forestry industry. The company collects climate, geo and process data and crunches this information into AI models for better prediction of forest inventories and forest management parameters. Linda Forest”s current users include forest management companies, forest funds and wood product companies. They use it to make better buying and selling decisions, use wood-based raw material more efficiently, and reduce their costs. “It could also be used to predict the risk of forest fires,” Rolf Schmitz adds, giving an interesting look into potential future uses of the product.
The largest AI initiative in forestry
Earlier this year, CollectiveCrunch successfully raised a total of EUR 600,000 and won a competitive bid at Metsähallitus, the company responsible for the Finnish state”s land assets and managing one third of Finland”s surface area. The two companies aim to improve harvesting and forest development planning through deep learning and big data analysis.
“We believe this to be the largest AI initiative in the forestry sector globally. Results from this close partnership will have a huge impact to the industry as a whole and benefit many across the value chain by utilizing Linda Forest,” says CollectiveCrunch”s Chief Product Officer Jarkko Lipponen. Currently, CollectiveCrunch is focused on the Nordic and Baltic markets, although long-term plans involve adopting the solution to Northern America, Russia and other forestry markets.
One of their clients is Setra, a large Swedish wood product company. According to Setra”s CDO, Axel Simonsson, they have been very happy with the progress of the on-going pilot project. “CollectiveCrunch has acted as a change agent between us and our supplier, making us think outside the box,” he describes.