Mast Reforestation

Inside the project

Founded as DroneSeed, the company pioneered FAA-approved heavy-lift drone seeding for post-wildfire recovery before rebranding its parent to Mast Reforestation in 2023. It built a vertically integrated supply chain, acquiring the 130-year-old Silvaseed seed bank in Washington (the largest privately held Western seed bank) and, in 2023, Cal Forest Nurseries in Etna, California. The model funds replanting on burned land by selling carbon removal credits, with reforested acres often locked into long-term conservation easements.

Mast raised a $36M Series A in September 2021 (led by Social Capital and Seven Seven Six), secured $15M in project financing from Carbon Streaming in May 2023, and closed a $25M Series B in February 2025 to expand into biomass burial (BiCRS), in which fire-killed, unmerchantable trees are buried to keep their stored carbon out of the atmosphere rather than being piled and burned.

The company's status is contested. Carbon Streaming, which invested $15M in exchange for credits, wrote the fair value of Mast's Sheep Creek (Montana) and Feather River Dome (Northern California) reforestation projects down to zero in its 2024 fiscal reporting after high seedling mortality and slower growth; Mast notified Carbon Streaming of the elevated mortality in January 2025. Separately, on 8 June 2025 OPB/JPR reported a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in Siskiyou County, California, by former business-development director Arnould De Villegas, who alleges CEO Grant Canary made inflated claims about future deals and overstated the value of Mast's 'ex-ante' (forward-sold) carbon credits. Mast's board has said an independent investigation, prompted by a January 2024 employee letter, found no wrongdoing; the allegations are unproven and the company disputes them.

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Mast Reforestation (mastreforest.com)Image source ↗

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Objectives

• Restore high-severity post-wildfire burn scars to healthy conifer forest across the Western US.
• Finance reforestation through the sale of carbon removal credits rather than relying solely on grants or landowner budgets.
• Operate a vertically integrated seed-to-seedling supply chain (seed banking, nurseries, drone and crew deployment) to scale planting.
• Diversify into immediately realized carbon removal via biomass burial of fire-killed trees to meet demand for lower-risk credits.

Approach

• Mast runs a vertically integrated seed-to-seedling supply chain: the acquired Silvaseed seed bank (Washington) and Cal Forest Nurseries (Etna, California) handle seed collection and seedling cultivation, with the operation described as among the largest seed banks in the Western US and producing tens of millions of seedlings annually. Planting combines ground crews with the company's FAA-approved heavy-lift drone fleet, the legacy DroneSeed capability used for aerial seeding on burned terrain.
• Carbon projects are developed for crediting registries: reforestation projects under the Climate Action Reserve's Climate Forward program and biomass-removal projects under Isometric's protocols. Monitoring (MRV) tracks seedling survival, growth and stocking against projected sequestration; the contested write-downs of Sheep Creek and Feather River Dome stemmed precisely from measured seedling mortality and slower-than-modelled growth running below the forward ('ex-ante') projections on which credits were sold, underlining why durable, transparent survival monitoring is central to credit integrity.