The Planet’s
Currency
Tehanu is a means for nature to pay for its own survival.
We build the infrastructure that enables a circular flow of money and data between other species and humans, ensuring they flourish together with us.
Animals, trees, and many other species are essential to the global economy. Our world cannot prosper if only humans benefit from its resources.
Tehanu exists in the belief that these species need to participate in our economy in order to survive.
How it Works
Extending the gig economy to life on Earth
Taxis have Uber. Rooms have Airbnb. Nature has nothing.
We believe it is possible to build a digital platform for life by enabling other species to make micropayments to human agents in return for pro-nature actions. Because species in need often live next to communities in need, our approach has the possibility of distributing planetary equity at unprecedented accuracy and scale.
Over time, we anticipate that Tehanu will help humans better share Earth with nonhumans.
Rwandan mountain gorillas have an existence value in excess of $1.5 billion
Our valuation of the 440 Rwandan mountain gorillas is one of the most detailed of any wild animal to date.
Tehanu Nº.1:
Mountain
Gorillas
Tehanu N°1, in 2024, addresses a family of mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
For the first time in history, a nonhuman species has held a digital identity, made its interests known, and sent money to humans in return for actions based on these interests.
Our partners in this small step in a multigenerational journey include gorilla NGOs, primatologists, technology partners, and the Government of Rwanda.
01 Data Collection
Scraping the online knowledge-base
We scraped the corpus of human knowledge on mountain gorillas (Gorilla berengei berengei), including census, morphology, biology and genetics, health, diet, social network, behaviour, and movement.
02 Digital Identity
Advancing Know Your Customer to Know Your Gorilla
We built an AI model to advance Know Your Customer (KYC) to Know Your Gorilla (KYG) and pave the way for proprietary Know Your Species (KYS) applications. We proved specific gorillas existed in a location over time through daily ranger visits, DNA sampling, camera traps and crowdsourced gorilla images that fed AI gorilla face-recognition to 93%+ accuracy.
03 Interests
Generating AI-assisted Species Interests
We combined human knowledge from scientific publications and expert interviews with an AI model to generate Tehanu AI-assisted species interests. We built a secure blockchain-based governance system to act on those interests.
04 Financial Exchange
Enabling Other Species to Hold and Spend Money
Our API connects Tehanu to the Rwandan MTN MoMo mobile money network, allowing payments to be made based on verified actions taken in line with observed interests. By enabling these gorillas to make payments, we showed it is possible for another species (or, more properly, its computational proxy) to hold and spend money.
"It makes no sense that the human market economy puts money into ores, promissory notes, and blocks of computer code, but not into the continuance of rare, complex, and ancient biological life (regardless of how difficult this is)."
— Jonathan Ledgard, CEO, Tehanu