Vlinder's Mission
Vlinder's mission is to empower people to make a planetary impact. Vlinder reinforce's high-quality climate projects with smart capital and innovation.
It invests in nature-based solutions, structure carbon products for the voluntary carbon market, enable their exchange on the Vlinder blockchain-based platform, and develop drone-based AI/ML CO2 sequestration monitoring.
The voluntary carbon market plays an important role in facilitating the transition towards a sustainable future with a stable climate. It is seen as an important contributor to achieving the Paris Agreement climate goals and is growing rapidly.
Vlinder believes that today the voluntary carbon market lacks mechanisms for early-stage financing of carbon projects due to high risk, high complexity and high information asymmetry. Eco entrepreneurs and tree planting communities have difficulties to finance the scaling of their reforestation efforts. These are the issues which Vlinder addresses.
How Vlinder works
Vlinder is focused on nature-based carbon removal solutions with significant social and biodiversity co-benefits, in particular, mangrove habitats restoration. Vlinder invests in and develops its own reforestation projects in various locations. The first projects are mangrove restoration in Myanmar, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
They partner with present-day eco heroes in developing countries
Implement projects with proven climate action
They ensure the projects provide environmental and social co-benefits: jobs and food security for the local population, natural protection from extreme weather events, nurseries for wildlife
Vlinder believes in long term sustainability. In order to support this belief, they have a community-based model to educate and employ locals, to provide scholarships and help schools, to support families and gender equality.
Vlinder helps businesses contributing to combating climate change by offsetting their carbon footprint. They empower companies as global change agents to make the world more sustainable socially and economically by offering them to invest in climate projects, to buy high-quality carbon credits and carbon offsets and to invest in future carbon credits.
Vlinder also built the blockchain-based “Vlinder Exchange” that would make climate project financing easier and transparent. They plan to do it by tokenizing and auctioning future carbon rights. Vlinder believe's this will help bring new long-term liquidity to scale carbon removal projects.
Unlike other marketplace solutions that resell ex-post carbon offsets or facilitate donations, Vlinder introduces new instruments that would enable people and companies to invest in carbon removal project development.
The Vlinder culture
The Vlinder company culture is very simple:
“You like the way the work is done and the people you work with”.
They are building the team they enjoy working with and do their best to design processes in the best possible way.
Vlinder values are:
Dream big
Deliver
Value the team
Enjoy the road
These are not just good-looking words to put on the website: The values make the team, support our vision and shape the culture of the company. When difficult and unclear situations arise, they are the pillars upon which the company leans on to help guide decisions.
The Vlinder team
The Vlinder core team has been working together for over 5 years now: they were part of the team that built a Swiss-based crypto exchange Lykke and also did a few other projects on the way. Vlinder is a diverse group of highly professional engineers and computer scientists, economists and environmentalists of 7 nationalities with extensive experience in launching impact startups and large-scale IT projects. The team members trust each other and enjoy working together. Vlinder was founded because they see engineering and technology as the power that could help to bridge the gap between green intention and green action.
Some of the core team members:
Alexander Spuller (Austria) is a serial fintech entrepreneur, a pioneer fintech and blockchain space investor. He is also strategist and manager of his family’s business, which has a mission to restore and regenerate historical real estate in Europe and to provide infrastructure for science and creativity. Alexander was an early investor in OANDA, the first online FOREX exchange, and in Lykke, one of the world's first crypto exchanges. Alexander is co-CEO and Founding Partner at Vlinder.
Dr. Sergey Ivliev (Russia) is an IT and financial risk management professional, serial fintech entrepreneur and blockchain visionary. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics, and is also a lecturer and a researcher. Previously Sergey co-founded Lykke and led the team which tokenized the world's first impact asset - TREE coin. He is currently a regional director at Professional Risk Management International Association in Russia, founder and head of Laboratory of Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Systems at Perm State University, and co-CEO and Founding Partner at Vlinder.
Dr. Irina Fedorenko (UK) is an Academic and a serial green tech entrepreneur, working on Nature-Based Solutions. She also manages the Caux Dialogue on Environment and Security, in partnership with the UN. Irina co-founded the first tree-planting drone company Dendra Systems and took it to series A. This work took Irina to Myanmar and across Asia where she developed tree-planting projects. Irina is an expert on carbon sequestration, having obtained a Ph.D. from Oxford. Irina is Chief carbon Officer and Founding Partner at Vlinder.
Rudi Hilti (Liechtenstein) is a purpose-driven serial entrepreneur and visionary known for his futuristic perspective towards systemic change and innovation. He is the founding chair of THE HUS. Institute, a Think & Action Tank to explore the transformation of the old economy into the digital modern era, and of The System Change Foundation. Rudi is Growth Director and Founding Partner at Vlinder.
Alan Laubsch (Germany) is an internationally recognized thought-leader in risk management. A founding member of the RiskMetrics Group and a former Vice-President in JP Morgan's Risk Management Solutions group, his mission is to catalyze a global risk culture to protect the systems that sustain us. For the last 5 years, Alan has been democratizing natural capital investment and collaborating with forest restoration and conservation projects around the globe.
Isabella Masinde (Kenya) is the leader of Vlinder’s project in Kenya and the CEO at Umita, a management consulting company working in Eastern and Southern Africa with governments, humanitarian and development organizations. Isabella has years of experience in community engagement and social development in Kenya.
check them out: https://vlinderclimate.com/
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