There is not a single listed natural capital vehicle anywhere in the world that hasn’t seen its value compressed by premature public market exposure—and the reason has almost nothing to do with the underlying assets. It has everything to do with the gap between what these platforms have actually built and what public market analysts are currently equipped to price. We spent the last six months in serious IPO discussions with leading global investment banks, and we walked away—not because the logic was flawed, but because the infrastructure that would allow public markets to recognise the difference between a land aggregator and a technology-enabled platform simply does not yet exist.
As our platform has scaled to £400m+ across 50,000+ acres—the UK’s largest genuine natural capital portfolio, built in under five years—conversations about public markets were inevitable, and over recent months they became very real: detailed discussions with specialist investment bankers, law firms, and private investors about what an IPO could look like for a business growing at this pace, in a sector building this much momentum. The pitch was compelling and the logic was sound—a sector growing faster than institutional capital can deploy into it, a portfolio with proven revenue diversification, and a technology layer that no comparable platform has attempted to build—but timing in capital markets isn’t about whether the thesis works, it’s about whether the market has the infrastructure to price what you’ve actually built, and in natural capital that infrastructure is still being constructed.
We do not believe an IPO would unlock value today. We believe it would compress it—because no listed natural capital comparable exists anywhere for the market to benchmark against, and without that benchmark, the default valuation framework becomes real estate with ecological characteristics rather than what Oxygen actually is: a technology-enabled platform with proprietary intelligence infrastructure, diversified revenue streams, and compounding data moats that create information asymmetry at scale.
The Three Preconditions for a Natural Capital IPO
Rather than treating this as a binary decision, we developed what we now call the Three Preconditions Framework—the conditions that must converge before a natural capital platform can list without destroying the very value it has built. We share it here because we believe it applies not just to our IPO timing but to any institutional investor evaluating when and how to deploy into listed natural capital vehicles, and because the framework itself reveals something important about where this asset class actually stands in its maturation cycle.
Precondition 1: Market Maturity
Nature must be broadly recognised and priced as critical national infrastructure, with standardised data, comparable metrics, and predictable regulatory frameworks that give public market analysts something to model against. We are closer than we have ever been—biodiversity net gain is mandated in the UK, the EU Nature Restoration Law is advancing, and the tone of institutional conversations has shifted fundamentally from whether to deploy to how quickly capital can be allocated at scale and who is capable of doing it with integrity—but the measurement infrastructure, the accounting treatment, and the regulatory durability that public markets require for confident pricing are still in formation. Listing before these frameworks stabilise means inviting analysts to price an asset class using tools designed for the previous paradigm, which systematically underweights the optionality embedded in ecological assets and systematically overweights the uncertainty that comes from regulatory novelty.
Precondition 2: Revenue Durability
Multiple revenue streams—carbon credits, biodiversity units, built property, renewables, ecotourism—must be proven repeatable and scalable across geographies, not just demonstrated in a single portfolio. Our revenue lines are diversifying and strengthening, including a record carbon pricing deal at £125 per credit through our Beyond Carbon partnership with Burges Salmon and the UK’s largest conservation debt package facilitated by Triodos Bank UK, and we are now formally expanding our platform into Europe—a deliberate step that reflects both growing institutional demand beyond the UK and the need to demonstrate that our model is not geography-dependent before inviting public market scrutiny of our growth trajectory. From our recent time with IPE Real Assets in Rotterdam as well as at the University of Gothenburgh and across the Nordics, the tone of conversation has shifted fundamentally from what it was even twelve months ago—more informed, more urgent, more confident—and the question is no longer whether natural capital belongs in institutional portfolios but how quickly it can be deployed at scale. By 2030, our portfolio will be materially larger, our revenue streams more diversified across jurisdictions, and our track record deep enough to give public market analysts the comparability and predictability they need to underwrite forward earnings with confidence.
Precondition 3: Intelligence Infrastructure
This is the precondition most people will miss, and it is arguably the most important—because it determines whether public markets price Oxygen as an asset manager or as a platform, and the valuation multiple gap between those two categories is enormous.
The AI and data layer that enables institutional-grade screening, underwriting, and verification of ecological assets must be operational and scalable before a listing can capture the value it represents. Our proprietary intelligence system, Oxygen Intelligence, integrates over 100 datasets spanning remote sensing pipelines, biodiversity classification models, hydrological mapping, carbon flux monitoring, and regulatory compliance layers into a single screening and underwriting platform that can evaluate new estates in seconds—a capability that took five years and tens of thousands of acres of operational data to build, and that creates compounding information asymmetry as the portfolio grows. Every estate we acquire makes the screening model more precise; every revenue outcome we record improves the underwriting algorithm; every dataset we integrate widens the moat between our origination capability and anyone attempting to replicate it.
Without this intelligence layer, public markets would be pricing land. With it, they are pricing a platform—one with proprietary data moats, technology infrastructure that scales non-linearly with portfolio growth, and an operating system that can be deployed across geographies without rebuilding from scratch. The difference in valuation methodology between those two framings is not incremental—it is categorical. We are building the operating system for natural capital markets, and that system needs more runway before it is ready for the scrutiny and comparability that public markets demand. But when it is ready, the market will not be valuing acreage. It will be valuing the intelligence infrastructure that makes acreage investable at institutional scale.
Until all three preconditions converge, we believe our responsibility is to keep building, keep proving performance, and keep educating the market about what institutional-grade natural capital infrastructure actually looks like.
What We’re Doing Instead: Scaling Capital in 2026
This is not a story about caution. It is a story about capital discipline—and about recognising that the most value-destructive thing a category leader can do is submit to public market pricing before the market has the tools to price the category correctly.
For the first time in our history, we are raising external capital in 2026—a conscious, deliberate step towards fulfilling our ambition to become the first natural capital unicorn, and a recognition that without materially larger pools of aligned, patient capital, the pace of restoration will always lag behind the pace of destruction. We say “planning” deliberately: this is acceleration towards our mission, not drift away from it, because the constraint on scaling conservation has never been available land or ecological opportunity—it has been the gap between how much capital the sector needs and how much institutional infrastructure exists to deploy it responsibly.
What has changed is the market. Momentum is building in the UK and accelerating across Europe, and we intend to remain at the sharp edge of that transformation. In the coming months, you will see us make structural changes to support this next phase: clearly defining where capital management belongs and where operational delivery sits, ensuring each is led, governed, and incentivised appropriately. This is about building a platform that is stronger, more investable, and more scalable—while remaining deeply accountable to the landscapes, the people who manage them, and the outcomes they deliver.
Long-Duration Stewardship and Capital Discipline
Investment structures may evolve, but the stewardship commitment is non-negotiable—and sophisticated allocators will recognise that this is not sentimentality but structural alignment between the duration of the assets and the duration of the management mandate. Natural capital infrastructure operates on multi-decade timescales: carbon sequestration compounds over thirty to fifty years, biodiversity recovery requires sustained management across ecological cycles, and the revenue optionality embedded in these landscapes—from emerging credit markets to regulatory tailwinds that have not yet been priced—only materialises if the steward remains patient enough to capture it. We are long-term holders of natural infrastructure, and every capital structure decision we make is designed to protect that alignment between asset duration and management horizon.
We are agile, learning fast, and building at speed—and that velocity of execution is precisely what would be constrained by the reporting cycles, quarterly earnings expectations, and short-duration performance pressures that public markets impose on listed vehicles. The regulatory frameworks, measurement standards, and market infrastructure that will define natural capital’s investability for the next decade are being built right now, and the organisations positioned to shape those frameworks are the ones with the operational freedom to experiment, iterate, and move faster than the consensus. That freedom is worth more than liquidity.
The Long Game
We are building a business designed to survive cycles, outgrow narratives, and remain relevant long after individual transactions, structures, or capital providers have come and gone—and that requires the discipline to say no to compelling opportunities in service of better ones that haven’t fully materialised yet. Scaling conservation demands the same patience that scaling any infrastructure business requires: you build the rails before you run the trains, you prove the unit economics before you invite public market scrutiny, and you ensure that the intelligence infrastructure underpinning your origination, underwriting, and verification is robust enough to compound advantage rather than expose fragility.
So far, we’ve Scaled Conservation. In 2026, we’re Scaling Capital. And when the three preconditions align—market maturity, revenue durability, and intelligence infrastructure—we will be ready to take the next step, not as a land aggregator seeking liquidity, but as the platform that defined how natural capital becomes investable at institutional scale.
The question I’d put to the market is this: is there a single listed natural capital vehicle anywhere that hasn’t seen its value compressed by premature exposure to public markets? If the answer is no, then our discipline isn’t caution. It’s the highest-conviction bet we could make.