Carbon Trust Investments (CTI) is the latest business to put money into the UK timber tracking technology specialist Helveta.
CTI is the investment arm of the Carbon Trust, the non-profit organisation that helps business and industry improve their environmental performance.
It has joined Oxford Capital Partners, Albion Venture and Success Europe in backing Helveta.
“The regulatory and consumer drivers for establishing the legality and sustainability of timber have accelerated the market for Helveta’s technology,” said CIT managing partner Peter Linthwaite. “It provides a uniquely robust means of delivering the necessary information to implement increasingly demanding regulations and we’re very excited about the opportunity this presents.”
The investment, he added, will support further development and deployment of software to track timber through the supply chain.
Helveta chief executive Patrick Newton expressed ‘delight’ at the funding.
“We’re now in a position to dramatically increase our presence in the world’s major tropical timber supply chains,” he said.
Earlier this year, Helveta announced that it was moving to bigger premises in Oxford on the city’s Milton Park business and science estate and this year would be increasing its workforce by 70% to cope with increased demand.
Its timber tracking system, which is a past joint winner of the TTJ Awards Environmental Achievement category, is based on the use of radio frequency or bar code identification tags attached to trees in the forest. Their location is mapped using global positioning system (gps) technology and the timber then tracked in real time through the international supply chain.
The Helveta software also encodes each country’s timber legality rules to ensure the way the material is transported and its traffic processed at customs does not break local laws.
It is currently used to track wood from Liberia, South Africa, Bolivia and Ghana, with most key end users currently in the EU.
