From Lab to Boardroom

NatureMetrics CEO Dimple Patel explains how the company evolved from a scientific pioneer into a global data platform – translating biodiversity data into decision-ready intelligence that investors, CFOs and boards now rely on to manage risk and resilience.

What was the inflection point when NatureMetrics shifted from scientific innovation to a scalable business?

The real inflection point wasn’t just a funding round or a technology update; it was a fundamental shift in mindset. We knew that to move from a scientific innovation to a scalable business, we had to stop selling ‘science’ and start selling ‘business intelligence’ in a way that made economic sense to us and our clients.

For a long time, we were the gold standard for eDNA – delivering incredible, high-fidelity data. But scientific innovation doesn’t scale if it remains artisanal. The pivotal moment came when we industrialised our process – achieving efficiencies and throughput which would take us global, combined with a product shift which turned complex biological data into a repeatable operating system that could speak the language of finance and operations. We had to build a ‘translation layer’ that turned raw biodiversity data into decision-ready metrics.

The proof that this model works lies in our client evolution. We stopped seeing engagement only from environmental researchers and started seeing demand from corporate sustainability teams, and eventually leaders who needed to manage risk across entire global portfolios, not just single sites. When blue-chip clients began integrating our data directly into their core investor and regulatory reporting rather than treating it as a CSR ‘nice-to-have,’ we knew we had achieved product-market fit.

Securing our Series B in early 2025 was the validation of this journey. It wasn’t just capital; it was the market acknowledging that nature data had graduated from the lab to the boardroom. That investment allowed us to cement our transition from a service provider to a global data infrastructure, ensuring that nature intelligence is finally robust enough to sit alongside financial intelligence

How has your experience in finance shaped the way you build and fund a climate-tech company today?

I’m an economist by training. Before I ever traded a bond at Goldman Sachs, I spent years studying market mechanics. That academic background taught me that the most dangerous risks in an economy are the ones that aren’t priced in—a concept that is central to the climate crisis. My time as a fixed-income trader then operationalised that theory; it taught me exactly how businesses price risk, how they prioritise investment capital, and which data points actually drive the needle for decision-makers.

That financial DNA is critical because it highlighted a massive blind spot in the global economy: we have sophisticated tools to manage financial capital, but we have been flying blind on natural capital.

I’ve carried this philosophy through building, scaling, and successfully exiting multiple ventures, from the turnaround of Love Koffee to scaling Trouva to 50 markets. Those experiences taught me that resource management is the single most important factor in survival. In a startup, if you misallocate cash, you die. In the broader economy, if we continue to misallocate and undervalue nature, the system collapses.

This is exactly how we positioned NatureMetrics for our recent Series B. I didn’t pitch a moonshot innovation; I pitched a solution to an economic inefficiency. Ultimately, my background taught me that capital flows where risk is understood and opportunity is quantified. We secured the recent $25m backing from Just Climate and the Monaco ReOcean Fund because we pitched nature not as a charitable cause, but as a critical economic asset. It was the direct result of applying financial discipline to a sector that has historically been viewed as ‘soft’.

What has been the biggest challenge in turning biodiversity data into something executives actually act on?

The core challenge has been bridging the gap between the granular detail ecologists need on the ground and the high-level clarity executives demand at the portfolio level. And as the market changed, the data capabilities also had to change.

For a long time, nature data was treated as a ‘tick-box’ exercise for sustainability reporting, so relying on low-accuracy proxies or modelled guesses was considered acceptable. But that mindset shifted when companies realised that nature risk directly impacts the bottom line. We saw this firsthand when a major energy project was halted for 18 months because early, traditional surveys missed a protected species. That wasn’t just an ecological oversight; it was a massive financial hit. That incident highlights why executives today need investment-grade accuracy, not just proxies.

Our job was to build the infrastructure to deliver that. We had to combine ‘ground-truthed’ eDNA data with AI to translate complex biology into clear, decision-ready metrics. It powers our predictive models and enables the portfolio-level intelligence that corporates require while maintaining the scientific rigour that ecology teams trust. This allows a leadership team to look at a global dashboard, identify a high-risk site, and trust that the red flag they are seeing is based on hard evidence. It turns biological complexity into the kind of operational confidence required to make billion-dollar decisions.

How do you balance rapid growth with the scientific credibility your customers rely on?

We don’t view it as a ‘balance’ between growth and credibility. In our business, scientific credibility is the product. If the data isn’t defensible, we have no business model.

That mindset starts with our team. We employ world-class scientists and PhDs who act as the guardians of our data integrity, ensuring that commercial targets never override scientific rigour. Innovation here combines the agility of software development whilst respecting the patience and rigour of scientific R&D. We dedicate months to rigorous internal and external validation, methodology reviews, and stress-testing before a new product or metric ever reaches the market.

This is reinforced by how we engage with our customers. We encourage deep due diligence—hosting lab tours, deep-dive technical Q&As, and detailed process reviews—so clients can see the discipline firsthand. We have built a culture where quality and integrity are an essential part of our product and service.

Paradoxically, this caution is what enables our speed. Because we spent years building a foundation of verified, ground-truthed eDNA data—now covering over 10% of the Earth’s surface—we know our data models are built on robust data foundations. This allows us to layer on geospatial and bioacoustic data to track trends and predict risks with a level of precision that proxies can’t match.

Our customers know that when they scale with us, they’re not just getting a ‘black box’ of algorithms. They are accessing a platform built on peer-reviewed science, maintained by the best minds in the field, and capable of standing up to the scrutiny of a boardroom

What leadership lesson from scaling through COVID most influences how you operate now?

The most critical lesson I learned in that period was how to make high-conviction decisions with low-resolution data. At Trouva, the onset of COVID created a perfect storm: our physical supply chain of independent boutiques locked down overnight, just as online demand exploded. We had to rebuild our entire operating model while navigating hyper-scale growth. In that environment, the data changed every hour. It reinforced a principle that goes back to my time on the trading floor: if you wait for perfect information, you have already missed the market. The skill isn’t in predicting the future; it’s in assessing the risk, sizing the move, and acting decisively. And communicating clearly throughout.

A leader’s role in a crisis isn’t to pretend to have all the answers—it’s to set the direction and hold the nerve. I had to be radically transparent with the team about what we didn’t know, which paradoxically gave them the confidence to step up and own the solution I’ve carried that directly into how I operate today. I realised that you cannot centralise command when the world is volatile, there are too many variables. I’ve learned that in high performing teams, if you trust them with the full context—even the scary parts—they don’t panic; they execute

What does NatureMetrics’ growth tell us about how sustainability is becoming a business imperative?

Our growth is a leading indicator that nature risk is finally starting to arrive with the Risk Committee. When you look at our client base, over 600 companies across 110 countries, the telling detail isn’t just the volume; it’s the sectors they represent. We are seeing massive uptake from energy, extractives, and heavy infrastructure. These industries don’t just buy data for ‘storytelling.’ They are buying it because they have stringent regulatory backdrops and they’ve realised that environmental volatility is now a material threat to their operational continuity.

The shift we are seeing is that sustainability is no longer about reputation; it’s about resilience. If you are a mining company or a food producer, your business model is physically dependent on functional ecosystems. If the water runs out or the soil degrades, you don’t just have a sustainability problem; you have a solvency problem.  Our growth tells us that the market is finally waking up to this reality. What strikes me most is the leadership dimension. The average CEO tenure is only about five years, yet degraded ecosystems take decades to restore. The leaders signing these deals today are making a profound choice to look beyond their own term limits. CFOs are realising that if they don’t build the infrastructure to measure and manage their natural capital today, they are effectively choosing to fly blind into a future of cascading risks. It’s no longer about ‘doing good’—it’s about staying in business.

Looking ahead, what does success look like – for you personally and for the company?

For me personally, I have always been drawn to the problems people say can’t be solved. Right now, the global economy is facing its ultimate tension: how to generate long-term economic growth without depleting the natural resources that underpin it. The intellectual challenge of designing a new economic model that solves that friction is what drives me. I’m not just building a business; I’m trying to prove that you don’t have to choose between profit and planet if you have the right data; the hardest problem of our generation.  For NatureMetrics, success looks like integration. I want to see a world where nature intelligence is so fundamental to business that it becomes boringly routine.

Success is when a CFO wouldn’t dream of signing off on a capital project without seeing the biodiversity risk report, just as they wouldn’t sign off without a credit check today. When we see financial-grade nature data driving investment decisions at scale, pricing risk into loans and valuing assets correctly, we will have achieved our goal. We won’t just have built a scalable company; we’ll be the architects of a new accountability layer that the global economy has been missing. This is how we achieve lasting change.