The world’s first not-for-profit venture studio taking on biodiversity loss, one bold mission at a time
There is a particular kind of entrepreneur who, having built successful companies and accumulated the freedom that comes with it, turns not toward retirement but toward the largest unsolved problems on Earth. Lawrence Leuschner is that kind of entrepreneur. Capacity, the organisation he founded in September 2024, is the most ambitious expression of that impulse yet.
To understand Capacity, it helps to understand its founder. Lawrence Leuschner was born in 1982 and grew up in Bavaria, Germany, the son of a Syrian immigrant who went from working as a mechanic at a petrol station to owning one and later running a car and truck rental company. That background – self-made, practical, oriented toward problem-solving – runs through everything Leuschner has built.
He co-founded reBuy in high school as Trade-a-game, expanding it into one of Europe’s largest online marketplaces for used electronics, extending the lifecycle of approximately 100 million products and generating over €100 million in annual revenue before he stepped away in 2017 after fifteen years as CEO. It was not retirement that followed, but discovery. Leuschner took a sabbatical – a 17-month world surf trip through South and Central America, travelling over 40,000 kilometres across more than 20 countries – during which he was confronted directly with the effects of climate change. He returned to Germany with the idea for TIER Mobility, a sustainable micro-mobility sharing provider.
TIER became a European unicorn, one of the continent’s leading e-scooter companies, and a platform from which Leuschner made a gesture that said something profound about his values: he pledged 100% of his shares in the company, via Founders Pledge, to Blue Impact Ventures, his own climate-focused investment vehicle.
His journey reflects a deliberate progression: sustainability first, then climate, and now biodiversity. Through Blue Impact, his fund that recycles all profits back into climate-positive ventures, and his role as a Venture Partner at AENU, Leuschner has spent recent years championing nature-based solutions and scaling ventures in biodiversity and conservation technology. Capacity is the culmination of that journey.
Capacity describes itself as the world’s first not-for-profit venture studio building scalable frontier technology solutions to end biodiversity loss globally. That sentence rewards unpacking. It is not a charity in the traditional sense – it does not fund existing conservation work or issue grants. It is a venture studio: it identifies a problem, builds a solution, recruits the talent to execute it, and scales it. The difference is that it does this in service of nature rather than profit, and it operates at a speed and ambition that conventional conservation organisations rarely match.
The scale of the problem it is addressing is not in dispute. Estimates suggest that every day, 150 species are lost. 75% of Earth’s land surface is degraded. Wildlife populations have declined by around 68% in the last 50 years. The United Nations has warned that biodiversity loss and climate change are deeply interconnected global threats, and the annual funding gap for nature protection and restoration stands at an estimated €700 billion.
Conservation today, Capacity argues, is fragmented, underfunded, and moving too slowly to match the scale of the crisis. Key technologies remain unscaled, frontline communities lack vital tools and support, and NGOs face persistent resource shortages. Capacity’s answer is to bring the tools and mindset of tech entrepreneurship – speed, scale, systems thinking, and access to capital — to bear on a challenge that has historically been left to under-resourced NGOs working in isolation.
The model is built around “Moonshot Missions”: deep-research-first, systematically designed interventions that are conceived for planetary scale, built with the best available entrepreneurs and operators, and supported by a global network of members who contribute expertise, resources, and connections. The organisation plans to build one to two such missions per year.
The first Moonshot is already operational. Mission One: The Shield is described as the first end-to-end system to stop illegal deforestation — from active monitoring to real-time alerts and enforcement support. It launched in 2025 with the mission to safeguard 280 million hectares of Amazon rainforest by 2030, and has already placed 8 million hectares across six Indigenous territories under protection.
The urgency is acute. 19% of the Amazon rainforest has already been lost. Scientists estimate that if the critical tipping point of 20–25% loss is reached, the rainforest risks being irreversibly transformed into a barren savanna — a collapse that would unleash vast carbon stores and trigger a global climate and biodiversity disaster.
The strategy is built around Indigenous communities, who are recognised as the Amazon’s most effective guardians: people with thousands of years of knowledge of the land, whose presence and stewardship have historically been the single most effective barrier to destruction. The problem is that they have been fighting with inadequate tools against well-funded and well-equipped opposition. Manual surveillance alone cannot cover and protect 280 million hectares — an area the size of France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK combined. 95% of infractions are illegal.
The Shield changes that equation. The system uses high-resolution, real-time satellite and sensor data from multiple sources, analysed by AI to detect potential threats through before-and-after comparisons with unprecedented speed and accuracy. When an invasion is detected, an alert is sent directly through Capacity’s Guardião app – community rangers on the ground receive all relevant incident details, including satellite imagery and GPS coordinates, giving them the opportunity to confirm the threat and respond. If local action is insufficient, the system compiles all collected information into a detailed, regulation-compliant legal report that is immediately escalated to federal and state authorities, including partners in the Federal Police.
It is, in the truest sense, a force multiplier – giving frontline communities the tools and intelligence to defend a territory that no human patrol alone could ever cover.
What makes Capacity genuinely distinctive is the network it has assembled around its missions. The organisation’s 300-plus “Stewards of the Planet” include Indigenous leaders such as Chief Tapi Yawalapiti and the legendary Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó people, alongside scientists, NGO leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors.
The team itself is a remarkable convergence of disciplines. The Head of Indigenous Relations, Flora Dutra, has over a decade of experience working alongside Indigenous leaders in the Amazon’s most remote border regions. The Head of Enforcement, Pedro Paulo Lins e Silva, is a Brazilian lawyer and serial entrepreneur who has spent 17 years working alongside Indigenous peoples through organisations he co-founded. The machine learning engineer building the deforestation detection algorithms, Philip Popien, brings nine years of experience turning geospatial data into real-world impact, having previously built flood mapping and methane detection models. The Founder’s Associate, Cassandra Yip, is an environmental scientist and venture builder who has worked with rural communities across Asia-Pacific and East Africa and championed environmental action at the United Nations and APEC.
This is not a team assembled from one world. It is a deliberate fusion of technological expertise, on-the-ground Indigenous knowledge, legal rigour, and entrepreneurial execution — which is precisely what the problem demands.
Capacity sits at an interesting intersection. It is neither a traditional NGO nor a tech company, neither a philanthropic foundation nor a venture fund. It is something genuinely new: an organisation that applies the full toolkit of modern entrepreneurship — deep research, systems design, speed to scale, global network — to the protection of the natural world.
Its stated goals are ambitious: to make biodiversity protection the world’s number one priority, to connect thousands of biodiversity activists, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, NGO leaders, and investors, and to help unlock the capital needed to close the $700 billion annual funding gap by 2030.
What gives these goals credibility is the track record of the people pursuing them. Lawrence Leuschner has built unicorn companies, mobilised nearly a billion dollars in capital, and – unusually for someone who has done so – given the proceeds away in pursuit of something he considers more important. The team around him has spent careers building at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and community.
The world has no shortage of organisations that care about biodiversity. What it has lacked is the entrepreneurial capacity to act on that care at the speed and scale the crisis demands. That is exactly what Capacity is trying to build.
You can learn more and join the network at capacity.eco.