About Funga
What's the right way to pronounce 'fungi'?
This is by far one of the most common questions we get from partners and supporters! The answer is: there is no one pronunciation that is definitively recognized as "right". Fungal experts and researchers of all stripes have adopted different approaches. Some say the most common "fun-guy", some say "fun-ji" (this is what our team uses!), and some even say "fun-gee" or “fung-jee”.
Then what is Funga?
The term that is our namesake (pronounced fun-gah) comes from the colloquial summation of biological life "flora, fauna, funga".
How did Funga get started?
Our founder, Dr. Colin Averill spent a career in academia studying the forest microbiome. How does the biodiversity of all the things you can’t see in the forest—the fungi and other microbes—control how fast the forest grows? Our ability to restore forests? The rate at which forests pull carbon out of the atmosphere? Before Funga he led a team at ETH Zürich studying these questions, using new DNA sequencing techniques in order to link fungal biodiversity to forest carbon removal. Ultimately, Colin realized answering this question required a level of replication and scale that wasn’t going to happen in his academic lab. But, if that level of scale could be achieved, it could unlock a massive natural climate solution, while restoring soil fungal biodiversity in the process. Going from science idea to VC backed startup is hard. Colin tracked down everyone he could find working at the intersection of science and climate. Approximately one million conversations later, he had a slide deck and a story. This began the process of cold pitching to VCs until Funga secured it’s first funding in summer 2022, led by Azolla Ventures.
About Our Science and Process
How does Funga make trees grow faster?
Trees grow best when they have a diverse microbiome belowground, filled with fungi that attach to tree roots and give the trees access to more resources. Funga works on land where much of that belowground biodiversity has been depleted due to intensive land management, and needs to be restored. Our work involves finding the right fungal community for a given region and then reintroducing it to the soil.
What is Funga’s process?
We gather hundreds to thousands of soil samples from forests across the country. We analyze these soil samples along with data about the site to determine where there are still healthy, biodiverse fungal communities in the soil that correlate with better growth rates. We then undergo multiple rounds of testing to confirm that these fungal communities do in fact create a positive growth result. At the end of this process we have multiple “winning” wild fungal communities, and we choose from those winners to determine which inoculant (fungal community) we will use in a given location. We then inoculate young seedlings with the chosen fungal community right before the area is replanted. The trees once again have their fungal partners belowground and can access more resources, allowing them to grow faster.
But fungi decompose trees! How can it help them grow?
It’s true that fungi play an important role in decomposition when the tree is no longer alive. But while the tree is still living, fungi play a critically important role helping the tree survive and grow.
How do you know which inoculants belong in which region?
We select inoculants based on what is best suited for that tree species, along with geography and climate conditions, and also make sure selected fungal communities are native to the area and represent what “should” be there if biodiversity hadn’t been depleted.
Why hasn’t this been done before?
It's easy to observe what happens aboveground, but much more challenging to see what occurs belowground. Historically, our ability to survey belowground biodiversity was extremely limited, relying on low-throughput, time-consuming microscopy or very basic molecular techniques. This began to change in the 2000s when technologies developed for sequencing the human genome were adapted by environmental microbiologists to study microbial biodiversity in natural environments. Over the past 20 years, these DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionized our understanding of belowground biodiversity. As the cost of DNA sequencing continues to decline, scientists are unlocking new capabilities to study the Earth’s microbiome at scale. In a nutshell: scientists have long known that soil microbes have an effect on forests. But without DNA sequencing, it was nearly impossible to pinpoint which microbes were doing what. In the past two decades, DNA sequencing has become a much faster and cheaper process, enabling research that had previously been tech-limited.
Can’t you buy mycorrhizal inoculants online? Why is this different from those products?
You can purchase a packet of mycorrhizal fungi online today, but academic research shows most existing commercial fungal inoculants are often dead on arrival, and if they aren’t dead, they generally don’t affect tree growth very much in the field. There was a boom of interest in forest fungal inoculant development in the 1980s and 90s, but this quickly disappeared as forest scientists discovered these products couldn’t reliably put up gains in the forest because of their one-size-fits-all approach. Funga’s approach is entirely different. Rather than focusing on a handful of species and strains that are then applied everywhere, we use huge datasets to identify which fungal communities are best suited to a particular environment. And instead of just one or a few species (what is usually in commercial inoculants), we use whole communities, analogous to approaches taken in human gut microbiome therapy.
Why don’t you isolate the MOST growth-promoting fungal species and use that?
In our analyses and those published by others, we find the whole microbiome, rather than any particular species, is the most powerful for predicting forest productivity (Anthony et al. 2024 Nature Communications). This is consistent with other ecological research—often a community of organisms is more powerful than the sum of its parts. Furthermore, it’s not our intention to spread the same organism(s) everywhere. In addition to removing carbon, our goal is to reintroduce native fungal biodiversity in regionally-specific ways.
Further Reading: Anthony et al. 2024 Nature Communications
Can you treat mature trees with these inoculants?
There is little evidence to suggest we can change the microbial community of mature trees through inoculation. Introducing key fungal communities when trees are very young is a key factor for creating lasting effects. This is not to say inoculating mature trees is impossible, but the potential is much less understood.
Can you do this for any tree?
Identifying healthy, native fungal communities for even a single tree species requires significant data collection and analysis effort, which is why we are starting with one species (Loblolly Pine) and planning to expand into others as we grow our team and operations.
Why are you focused on the Southeastern US?
The Southeastern US is one of the largest timber markets in the world, and is mostly dominated by one species, loblolly pine. A large, sophisticated forestry infrastructure stack allows us to scale quickly in this region. From a biodiversity perspective, it is also advantageous that the loblolly pine is native to the Southeast, allowing us to work with native fungal communities. Furthermore, timber is an important agricultural commodity crop, essential to decarbonizing the built environment (more on that below), and increasing productivity of existing forests could aid decarbonization while avoiding further land conversion. These factors led us to conclude that this is the species and region where we could scale the fastest during the early years of our operations.
Does DNA sequencing mean that you are genetically modifying the fungi?
No. Funga does not use genetically modified organisms (GMO)s. DNA sequencing is an essential tool for Funga’s scientists to identify fungi, but this process does not involve altering DNA. More simply, we don’t cultivate fungi in a lab and we certainly don’t modify them, we simply find them in the wild.
About Our Business Model
How does Funga make money?
Funga establishes partnerships with landowners who are about to replant a portion of their forest. We inoculate their seedlings before planting, which leads to faster growth and more timber being produced. The additional timber equates to additional carbon stored in the forest, and later in the built environment post-harvest. We can then sell credits on the voluntary carbon market, and our work goes through multiple layers of third-party verification to ensure that additional carbon is actually being stored. Our customers are companies who buy carbon removal credits as one part of their broader strategy to reduce their emissions footprint.
Is anyone else doing what Funga is doing?
No. Funga is the first company of its kind to focus on restoring underground fungal communities with native, biodiverse and region-specific inoculants that have been tested and proven to improve forest health and growth outcomes, as well as carbon storage.
Why even bother with carbon removal credits? Why not just sell the inoculant?
Since our inoculants help trees grow, it’s intuitive to ask why we don’t just sell this input directly to the landowner. Even though our inoculants can create additional revenue (higher yield) for landowners in the long run, there are a suite of economic, cultural and technological barriers that prevent landowners from doing this in the absence of climate finance. By leveraging carbon markets, our landowners receive growth-promoting inoculations free of charge, and we share carbon revenues with them. Instead of our inoculations being a financial burden to timber farmers, it can unlock a new form of passive income. This massively increases the number of acres this practice can be deployed on, maximizing the impact of our carbon program.
About Our Carbon Removal
How do you know these trees are storing more carbon?
No matter the size of the trial or project instance we plant, we reserve a portion of the landscape for uninoculated control areas. These locations are chosen randomly within the larger planting footprint, and are planted with trees that have not been inoculated with fungi. These are our “business as usual” plots that we can use as reference when assessing the additional growth of inoculated trees. If the inoculated plots consistently have significantly more biomass (more wood), than the control plots, and all other variables have been accounted for, then our inoculations enabled more carbon to be captured on that land. We also work closely with verification agencies and third party auditing to increase the rigor and transparency of our results.
Funga uses aboveground measurement to calculate additional carbon storage, but what about soil carbon?
Right now, it is straightforward to calculate aboveground carbon sequestration by monitoring wood volume. While we know that carbon is also stored in the soil, quantifying the belowground carbon is far more complex, and science is still in the process of developing reliable, cost efficient methods to do this. For now, it's exciting to think that even more carbon (of some still-mysterious amount) is also accruing belowground, in addition to the aboveground wood biomass we can rigorously measure and verify.
But forestry trees are harvested, is all that additional carbon lost when the tree is cut down?
Actually, no! While the tree is alive, it is continually pulling more carbon out of the air, and storing that carbon in its wood. When the tree is cut down, it is no longer adding to its carbon storage, but all the carbon it stored previously is still there. Until that wood ceases to exist, either through decomposition or fire, the carbon that wood harbors stays out of the atmosphere and lives on in things like furniture, building materials, and even telephone poles. For this reason, where that wood goes next really matters. Within loblolly pine forestry, about 40% of all the additional carbon enters long-lived harvested wood products with >100 year lifetimes. Currently, we only consider this 40% subset of the additional tree biomass as “additional”, and this is how we generate durable, nature based carbon removal.
There have been other forestry-related carbon removal projects that have been discredited recently. Wouldn’t this project have the same inherent problem?
Early carbon projects had challenges defining the “baseline” scenario—what would have happened in the absence of the carbon project intervention. In forestry, a lot of these involved projects that claimed their project sites were “protected” from harvest, but were unlikely to ever be harvested in the first place. This is part of the learning process that comes with establishing new markets and services like those in the voluntary carbon market. Funga’s carbon projects are distinct from these early efforts. By including co-located, un-inoculated control areas we can directly quantify how much additional carbon is removed by our intervention. We don’t have to rely on hypotheticals, the counterfactual baseline scenario is directly observable. Then, our measurements are verified and validated by third parties before any carbon credits are issued. We are only issued credits based on the measured difference between project (inoculated) and baseline (un-inoculated) scenarios.
Why buy carbon removal with 100 year permanence when I could buy carbon removal with 1000 year permanence?
Different classes of carbon removal have different “durabilities”—how long that carbon stays out of the atmosphere once removed. Some technologies, like direct air capture, likely keep carbon out of the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but come at extremely high cost (at least for now). We need carbon removal to begin scaling today, and natural climate solutions offer a scalable path at a much lower price point, which means the market can achieve a much larger scale more quickly (Griscom et al. 2017 PNAS). To be clear—we need all hands on deck here. We applaud efforts to build carbon removals with longer durabilities. But we also need to begin removing carbon in large quantities as soon as possible to hit IPCC carbon removal targets of 10 gigatons a year by 2050, and 20 gigatons a year by 2100. Finally, natural climate solutions can have important benefits beyond carbon removal, especially for biodiversity. In Funga’s case, restored belowground fungal biodiversity in the regions we work.
Further Reading: Griscom et al. 2017 PNAS
Isn’t this a really SLOW method for capturing more carbon?
Yes and no. Trees take time to grow, but speed isn’t just about how fast carbon is removed—it’s also about how fast we can scale the solution. Nature-based methods may be inherently slower, but they can be deployed now, across millions of acres, making them a powerful and immediate tool for carbon removal.
Wouldn’t forest restoration be more effective for capturing additional carbon?
Forest restoration is essential. However, creating a more sustainable future will require both restoring wild ecosystems and making necessary human activity as low-impact as possible. We will continue to need large-scale cultivation of food crops like wheat and corn, and similarly, we will continue to need wood as we build more housing and infrastructure. Just as we are improving agriculture with more regenerative practices, the same is possible with timber. And we believe that soil microbiome restoration is just the first step of many!
What happens if there is a fire/pest outbreak/hurricane or other natural disaster?
Funga’s projects are designed to minimize risk through a distributed approach. Instead of relying on a single large project, we operate a decentralized network of many smaller projects spread across the southeastern U.S. This diversification helps mitigate the impact of any single storm, fire, or natural disaster on the overall project. In addition, all our carbon projects contribute credits to a “buffer pool” which works as a form of insurance for unintended project loss due to these natural disasters. These credits are not sold, and instead are reserved for these potential reversals.
About Carbon Removal Credits (Generally)
If we don’t stop emitting CO2 to the atmosphere, this carbon removal won’t matter. Who cares? Isn’t this a distraction?
At our current global emission rates, there is no way to simply remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Full stop. Responsible net zero targets set by corporations and governments must focus on reducing emissions first and foremost. However, given climate inaction to date, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that staying within key climate boundaries will require both drastic emissions cuts as well as active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if we are to avoid key climate warming tipping points. Specifically, the IPCC targets 10 gigatons of CO2 removal per year by 2050, and 20 gigatons by 2100. Engineered solutions alone are not ready to meet the speed and scale of climate intervention required by 2030, 2050, and beyond. That is why ready-to-scale Nature Based Solutions (NBS) are essential to meet carbon removal targets with the speed required.
Why do companies buy carbon removal credits?
Companies that set net-zero goals and participate in the voluntary carbon market are often motivated by: A) Recognition that unfettered global warming is a significant threat to their operations and bottom line, and B) expectation of customers, partners, and investors that the company takes responsibility for its emissions and has a plan to reduce and counteract them moving forward. While they are not mandated to do so by any government regulation, many companies see net-zero plans as an essential step towards future-proofing their business.
About Our Partners
Why work with the timber industry? Isn’t cutting down trees bad for the environment?
At Funga, we believe forestry can play a vital role in combating climate change and supporting biodiversity when managed sustainably. We are focused on advancing "regenerative forestry." This approach emphasizes forest management practices that enhance ecosystem health, sequester carbon, and promote biodiversity—above and below ground. And while 20th century forestry did engage in some damaging practices (like harvesting long-lived, wild forests that had not been agriculturally developed and harbored priceless biodiversity of plants and animals), today’s timber industry is more similar to other forms of agriculture. Trees are planted, grown, and harvested on the same land over and over. In addition, timber is becoming an increasingly important material in transitioning away from high-emissions building materials like concrete and steel. When harvested sustainably and used in long-term applications like mass timber construction, wood serves as a durable carbon sink, locking in the carbon it absorbed during the tree's growth. Unlike building with concrete and steel, which releases carbon, building with wood ensures that the carbon remains stored for decades or even centuries. By integrating fungal restoration into managed forest landscapes, we unlock the potential for forestry to contribute positively to biodiversity, rural livelihoods, and a low-carbon infrastructure, making it a cornerstone of a sustainable future. Lastly, our work in forestry is part of a broader roadmap that has also allowed us to develop our approach for native forest restoration, and engage with a broader portfolio of regenerative forestry practices that can further environmental sustainability within forestry practice.
Why limit your work to commercial forestry, and not include forest restoration projects?
We’re a small team that has chosen to begin to scale our approach in a system where large scale reforestation infrastructure is ready to deploy this solution at large scales. Furthermore, we believe both natural and managed landscapes have important roles to play in addressing tandem climate and biodiversity crises. If we can build biodiversity back into managed landscapes, while also removing additional carbon from the atmosphere and supporting rural economies, we see that as a big win for people, climate, and nature. However, our work in forestry has already enabled our expansion into native forest restoration, with our first trials in longleaf pine already in the ground. Ultimately, it’s about developing our approach to different markets strategically so we can make the most of our resources, and create important environmental outcomes across both managed and natural landscapes.
