A farmer wants to change the way a field is managed.
Use cover crops.
Reduce tillage.
Improve crop rotation.
Upgrade machinery.
Use less synthetic fertiliser.
Build more organic carbon into the soil.
The potential benefits may take years to fully appear.
The costs arrive immediately.
That gap between what agriculture needs to become and who pays for the transition is where Vilnius-based InSoil has built its business.
The Lithuanian company combines agricultural lending, agronomic support, soil measurement and carbon markets in an attempt to solve a surprisingly difficult financing problem:
how do you give farmers the capital to improve their land today when much of the economic and environmental value only emerges later?
InSoil’s answer is to treat the transition itself as something that can be financed.
Farmers receive capital.
They adopt regenerative agricultural practices.
Changes in the soil are measured.
Carbon removals and emission reductions can, where the methodology supports them, be converted into verified carbon credits.
And companies looking for measurable climate impact become another potential source of money flowing back toward the land.
The underlying idea is simple: healthier soil should not only be environmentally valuable. It should become economically valuable too.
Before InSoil, there was HeavyFinance
The company was founded in Lithuania in 2020 by entrepreneurs including Laimonas Noreika, Andrius Liukaitis and Darius Verseckas.
Its original name explained the first version of the business clearly:
HeavyFinance.
Agriculture is capital intensive.
A tractor may cost more than an apartment.
Land is expensive.
Modernisation requires machinery.
Working capital is needed long before a harvest generates revenue.
And smaller agricultural businesses do not always fit neatly into the lending models preferred by traditional banks.
HeavyFinance initially attacked that problem by creating a financing marketplace connecting investors with European farmers.
The thesis was already broader than conventional consumer fintech.
Instead of financing another online purchase or unsecured personal loan, capital was directed toward productive agricultural businesses.
But over the following years, the company’s focus began shifting.
It was no longer only financing farms.
It was increasingly financing how farms change.
In April 2025, HeavyFinance became InSoil.
The new name reflected the transformation.
“Soil is at the core of everything the company does,” founder and CEO Laimonas Noreika said at the time — from financing and agronomic support to soil-carbon measurements and carbon-credit generation.
The rebrand was more than a visual change.
It explained what the company had gradually become.
The soil is infrastructure
Agriculture tends to be discussed in terms of crops.
Wheat.
Corn.
Rapeseed.
Potatoes.
But underneath all of them sits the same productive infrastructure.
Soil.
Healthy soil stores water better.
Supports biological activity.
Contains organic matter.
Can be more resilient to drought and erosion.
And, crucially for climate finance, soil can store carbon.
Regenerative agriculture broadly attempts to improve that underlying system rather than treating each growing season as an isolated production cycle.
Practices can include reduced or no-till cultivation, cover crops, diversified rotations, residue management and changes in fertiliser use.
The difficulty is that changing agricultural practices is not free.
A farmer may need different equipment.
There can be transition risk.
Yields do not necessarily improve immediately.
New techniques require knowledge and experimentation.
And a business operating on relatively thin agricultural margins may not be enthusiastic about taking on that uncertainty simply because it is environmentally desirable.
This is where finance becomes part of the climate technology.
Finance the transition first
InSoil provides medium-term financing to agricultural SMEs for purposes including equipment, land, buildings and working capital.
By June 2026, the company said it had financed more than 3,500 agricultural SMEs across Europe since 2020. Its current platform materials report more than €111 million in loans issued.
But its most interesting financing product may be the Green Loan.
The model is designed to reduce the immediate financial barrier for farmers moving toward regenerative practices.
Instead of asking the farmer to bear the entire transition cost upfront, external capital can finance the change while the resulting carbon value forms part of the economic model.
That is where InSoil’s lending business connects to its carbon business.
A loan gets a farmer into the program.
New practices change what happens in the field.
Measurements determine whether those changes produced quantifiable climate outcomes.
Verified carbon credits can then create another source of value.
The farm is no longer simply borrowing money.
It is potentially financing the improvement of a measurable environmental asset.
Measuring dirt is harder than it sounds
The difficult part of soil carbon is not saying that soils can store carbon.
The difficult part is proving how much changed because of a particular intervention.
A tonne of carbon stored in soil cannot be seen like a tonne of steel in a warehouse.
It has to be measured and modelled.
You need a baseline.
Soil samples.
Information about management practices.
Laboratory analysis.
Geographic data.
Remote sensing.
Repeated measurements.
And a methodology capable of distinguishing project impact from what would have happened anyway.
This process is generally referred to as MRV — Measurement, Reporting and Verification.
InSoil combines laboratory soil sampling with satellite and other digital monitoring methods and agronomic assessment.
By mid-2026, the company said it had conducted more than 15,000 soil samples, building what it describes as one of the region’s largest private soil-carbon datasets.
The data has two potential uses.
It helps measure environmental change.
But it can also improve understanding of the agricultural businesses being financed.
In other words, the same company is gradually accumulating both credit data and soil data.
That combination is unusual.
From soil measurement to a carbon credit
If an agricultural project can demonstrate eligible, additional and verified greenhouse-gas reductions or removals, those results can be represented through carbon credits.
For InSoil, that process reached an important milestone in 2026.
Its Carbon Farming Program of Lithuania completed registration under Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard.
Verra describes the program as covering 18,510 hectares across Lithuania and using its VM0042 Improved Agricultural Land Management methodology. The project is expected to deliver more than 585,000 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent reductions and removals over its 20-year lifetime.
InSoil said that more than 130,000 Verified Carbon Units were expected from the project’s first monitoring period.
This matters because the company is moving from the theoretical promise of future soil-carbon credits into actual commercialisation.
Farmers can begin receiving money linked to verified environmental outcomes.
Companies can buy the resulting credits.
And the financial loop begins to close.
Carbon markets demand evidence
Carbon markets have attracted justified scrutiny.
A credit is only useful if the underlying climate claim is credible.
Was the carbon genuinely removed or the emission genuinely avoided?
Would the same change have happened without the project?
How accurately was it measured?
Will it remain stored?
Are the assumptions conservative enough?
Those questions have pushed the voluntary carbon market toward increasingly detailed standards, methodologies and third-party verification.
InSoil’s Lithuanian program uses Verra’s VM0042 methodology for improved agricultural land management. The current version of that methodology covers both greenhouse-gas emission reductions and soil-organic-carbon removals, with requirements around baselines, additionality, monitoring and measurement.
In 2025, independent verifier SCS Global validated and verified InSoil’s program, reporting approximately 154,915 tonnes of greenhouse-gas removals and reductions across 40 farms covering almost 20,000 hectares during the assessed period.
This is important to the company’s entire proposition.
If the measurement layer is not trusted, the financial layer eventually stops working too.
The farmer gets another crop — carbon
There is an interesting conceptual shift inside this model.
Traditionally, a field produces a crop.
The farmer sells grain, vegetables or another agricultural commodity.
Regenerative agriculture potentially adds another economically measurable output:
improved soil carbon.
The farmer still produces food.
But changes in how the land is managed may also produce verified climate outcomes that have value to another buyer.
In 2026, farmers participating in InSoil-linked carbon programs began receiving some of the first direct revenue from generated carbon credits.
One Lithuanian farmer highlighted by the company had entered the program in 2020. Her participating fields had accumulated an average of around 2.4 tonnes per hectare over the period measured, and revenue from the credits was paid back to the farm.
That creates a potentially powerful incentive.
Environmental improvement stops being purely a cost centre.
It can become part of farm income.
€100 million from the carbon side
The scale of that idea became clearer in June 2025.
InSoil signed a €100 million agreement with Canadian carbon-finance company Key Carbon.
Under the partnership, Key Carbon gained the right to invest more than €100 million into InSoil’s zero-interest Green Loans over several years, while a separate €3.7 million investment supports expansion of the company’s carbon-farming activities.
The ambition was substantial.
InSoil said the partnership would help expand its carbon-farming program toward one million hectares of European farmland.
By July 2025, the company reported around 800,000 hectares enrolled across its Green Loan and Carbon Farming programs.
This reveals an important part of the business model.
Carbon buyers are not simply arriving at the end of the process to buy a certificate.
Their capital can help finance the agricultural transition that generates the environmental outcome in the first place.
The carbon market begins acting as a financing mechanism.
Then €120 million arrived from private credit
A year later, another piece of the financial architecture moved into place.
In June 2026, InSoil secured a €120 million senior secured credit facility from Pollen Street Capital.
The facility is intended to expand lending to small and medium-sized agricultural businesses across Europe.
The underlying loans benefit from an European Investment Fund guarantee under InvestEU, and can finance equipment, land, building improvements and working capital associated with agricultural businesses and their transition.
This is a very different source of capital from the crowdfunding marketplace on which the company originally grew.
Institutional private credit can provide much larger pools of financing.
That matters because the problem InSoil is attacking is not small.
European agriculture involves millions of businesses, enormous amounts of equipment and land, and investment cycles measured in decades.
Financing agricultural transition at meaningful scale cannot depend only on individual retail investors writing small tickets.
Institutional capital has to enter.
From fintech marketplace to capital infrastructure
This helps explain the evolution from HeavyFinance to InSoil.
The earliest business could be described relatively easily:
connect investors with farmers needing loans.
Today the structure is becoming more sophisticated.
Retail and professional investors still have access through InSoil Finance, the investment marketplace side of the group.
Private-credit institutions can supply large lending facilities.
The European Investment Fund can provide guarantees.
Carbon-market investors can finance Green Loans.
Corporate carbon buyers can ultimately purchase verified credits.
Agronomists help farmers change practices.
Measurement systems verify what happened in the soil.
InSoil sits in the middle and attempts to connect the flows.
Capital goes toward the farm.
Agricultural practices change.
Environmental outcomes are measured.
Financial value can flow back.
That is considerably more interesting than conventional lending.
It is also a data business
There is another asset growing quietly underneath the financial one.
Data.
Agricultural credit performance.
Farm characteristics.
Soil composition.
Management practices.
Satellite observations.
Carbon measurements.
Changes across repeated sampling periods.
As the number of fields and farms increases, InSoil accumulates a dataset connecting financial behaviour with real physical agricultural conditions.
The company already says its soil dataset is used both for measuring changes and informing credit-risk analysis.
That could become strategically significant.
Conventional lenders often understand farms primarily through accounts, collateral and repayment history.
A specialist agricultural financier can potentially understand the land itself.
What condition is the soil in?
How is it being managed?
Is the farm investing productively?
How resilient might it be to weather shocks?
Do regenerative practices change economic performance over time?
The closer finance moves to the physical reality of agriculture, the more differentiated the underwriting can become.
Regeneration is not philanthropy
One of the more important aspects of InSoil’s model is that it does not depend on assuming farmers will make changes solely for environmental reasons.
A farm is a business.
It has wages.
Debt.
Equipment.
Fuel.
Fertiliser.
Weather risk.
Commodity prices.
Cash-flow constraints.
Regenerative agriculture has to survive those realities.
InSoil therefore talks not only about carbon sequestration but also soil health, yields, profitability and resilience.
That distinction matters.
A climate solution that only works when someone continually subsidises an uneconomic farm practice will struggle to scale.
A practice that improves soil resilience while accessing cheaper or more appropriate capital and potentially creating an additional revenue stream has a much stronger chance.
The environmental and financial incentives begin pointing in the same direction.
The target is one gigatonne
InSoil’s long-term stated mission is unusually large.
The company says it wants to support the removal of one gigatonne of CO₂ by 2050 through regenerative agriculture and soil-carbon programs.
That number should be understood as an ambition, not a current outcome.
But it illustrates the scale at which the founders are thinking.
Soil is one of the few climate assets already distributed almost everywhere.
No new factory has to be invented before it exists.
No enormous physical carbon-capture machine has to be deployed on every hectare.
The land is already there.
The farmers are already there.
The challenge is changing practices across enough of it — and proving what those changes achieve.
That makes the bottleneck partly technological.
But it is also financial.
Lithuania as the proving ground
Despite its European ambitions, one of InSoil’s most important testing grounds remains Lithuania.
The company’s first large-scale soil-carbon program was built here.
Lithuanian farms provided the fields.
Thousands of soil samples created the measurement base.
Local farmers tested whether the financial incentives worked.
And the resulting program became one of Europe’s early large-scale registered soil-carbon projects under Verra.
For the Lithuanian startup ecosystem, this is an interesting kind of company.
It is not building another purely digital product for a global SaaS market.
Its technology touches physical land.
Its customers include farmers.
Its product includes debt.
Its data comes partly from soil laboratories and satellites.
Its climate output has to be independently verified.
And its growth increasingly depends on institutional capital measured in hundreds of millions of euros.
It is fintech, climate tech, agri-tech and financial infrastructure at the same time.
The ground beneath the financial system
The most interesting idea behind InSoil is not really carbon credits.
Nor is it agricultural lending.
It is the connection between them.
For decades, financial systems have been good at placing a value on land.
A hectare has a price.
It can be bought.
Sold.
Mortgaged.
Used as collateral.
InSoil is trying to make another characteristic of that hectare economically legible:
what is happening inside the soil.
Is its organic carbon increasing?
Are farming practices becoming more regenerative?
Can those changes be measured?
Can they reduce risk?
Can they generate an additional revenue stream?
And can future environmental value help finance today’s transition?
If the answer to enough of those questions becomes yes, soil stops being merely the surface on which agriculture happens.
It becomes something closer to productive climate infrastructure.
InSoil began in 2020 by helping farmers obtain financing.
Six years later, it has financed thousands of agricultural businesses, built one of Europe’s significant soil-carbon programs, secured €100 million of carbon-linked financing and another €120 million of institutional private credit.
The company is still ultimately doing something remarkably old-fashioned.
It is lending money to farmers.
But the thing being financed has changed.
InSoil is betting that the future value of farmland will increasingly depend not only on what can be harvested from above it — but on what can be restored underneath it.
Learn more about InSoil: InSoil