Quanterra was established in 2021, and currently has 9 employees. The HQ is in Exeter but staff also work remotely in the UK and The Netherlands.
Quanterra is a spin-out from the University of Exeter offering ecosystem monitoring as a service, particularly monitoring carbon flows between the ecosystem and the broader atmosphere.
Working on projects in the UK and USA, they aim to provide affordable and timely measurement of carbon flows that enable high trust carbon markets and support projects aiming to establish a greater understanding of carbon flows in Nature Based Solutions to climate change. This includes for example, comparisons of conventional and regenerative agriculture – establishing whether the flows of carbon are improved by taking different approaches to farming. Projects are sited in 10 different states across the US and a variety of locations across the UK. A number of projects are initiated by academic or business researchers, who want to understand more about how their commercial solution might impact on carbon sequestration, such as people working to amend soil health or nature-based solutions to climate change using offsetting or insetting. Monitoring systems are needed to evaluate these projects and Quanterra helps them to understand continuously whether carbon is being emitted or sequestered.
Rebecca Mitchell, Chief Executive, explained: “We needed an office and a workshop/lab space. Exeter Science Park is great for us because we don’t have to worry about things like utilities, security etc as it’s all included as part of the service provision. It’s a great location because it’s accessible to the city centre, the University, airport and motorway. Living nearby makes walking or cycling to work easy.
“As we are an environmental monitoring business, a lot of our team care passionately about the environment and spend their leisure time doing things in the natural world. Being here is close to the moors, close to the sea and we can access other places quite easily so basing our business here is important for personal leisure time and work.”
“Quanterra anticipates growing substantially over next 5-10 years and the option to move into bigger premises is great for us as we don’t know exactly when that growth is going to happen, so the flexibility at Exeter Science Park is really helpful. We expect to grow to around 30 people in the next 2-3 years, partly in science to underpin what we do and partly to meet demand for our services, particularly in Australia and Brazil.”
