New Australian legislation allows public to invest as Earth Guardians creates biodiversity conservation marketplace.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
As Australian politicians and activists debate how best to slow the mass extinction of species, an Australia-based tech company will be rebelling against extinction in another way:
The free market economy.
Earth Guardians, and its will known award-winning social enterprise, QuestaGame, will be launching an equity crowdfund to allow Australian investors to buy shares in a company harnessing the power of free markets, technology and the community, to protect life on our planet.
“It’s an exciting moment, many years in the making,” says Andrew Robinson, co-founder and Chair of Earth Guardians. “We’ve finally cracked a scalable revenue model that can unleash market forces to have a significant global impact on biodiversity conservation.”
QuestaGame BioQuests are starting to appear in mainstream locations.
As part of its expansion, Earth Guardians will be releasing a new, more mainstream app called Guardians of Life, which includes enhanced augmented reality (AR) capabilities to enhance the gameplay, generate more accurate data, stimulate learning, and reward players for their achievements in the field.
Global gaming is estimated to be a $150 billion market.
Over the last several years, the company has experienced significant growth in participation, revenue and job creation. Its unique revenue model involves refining the biodiversity data collected by players, so that the data is useful to a wide variety of customers - from biosecurity to agriculture, eco-tourism and education.
“With QuestaGame’s technology and our unique BioSmart Expertise Engine,” says Robinson, “we’re seeing a scalable way to radically transform humanity’s connection to nature and create a new generation of environmental custodians; which is absolutely critical given the high rate of extinction we’re seeing today.”
Even some large corporates have begun using QuestaGame’s outdoor team-based gameplay as a tool for team-building, employee well-being, and a clear measure of environmental awareness.
Revenue, meanwhile, is shared with participating organisations via Earth Guardians “Pays to Know Nature” program, which means players can earn a part of the revenue based on how much they contribute to refining the data.
To fund the next stage of growth and to scale revenue and impact, Earth Guardians has decided to raise investment through equity crowdfunding.
Equity crowdfunding, which became licensed in Australia in 2018, is a new way for Australian companies to raise investment from the public, allowing businesses to bring communities on their journey of growth.
“It’s an exhilarating experience to play QuestaGame and learn you’ve contributed a sighting that’s valuable to conservation efforts,” says David Haynes, an early contributor to the company. “What’s even more empowering though is being part of the team behind Earth Guardians, and making that experience a reality for as many people as possible.”
Connecting people to nature, finding biosecurity threats, protecting biodiversity.
“This method of fundraising is a nice fit for our technology,” says Robinson, “which is designed to treat individuals as equal partners, with their own opportunity to receive real rewards from their contribution to biodiversity data - as opposed to treating people like mass volunteers or data products for advertisers.”
The company began in 2015 with a crowdfunding campaign of just $3500 for a prototype app. QuestaGame’s player community has since expanded to over 45 countries, generating over 2 million sightings and identifications of plants and animals (and fungi) on land and in the ocean.
In 2018 the company was awarded the Eureka Prize for Citizen Science Innovation. It’s currently headquartered in Cairns, with an office recently opened in Hyderabad, India.
Earth Guardians expects to launch the equity crowdfunding on the PledgeMe platform in May 2020. PledgeMe, which set up offices in Australia last year, has already achieved successful raises for a number of Australian startups.
“What’s most exciting to me is that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in this space,” says Robinson. “This is a vast and largely untapped market, so quite an expansive growth opportunity ahead.”
The equity crowdfunding campaign launch date will be announced in November.
For more information, see https://questagame.com/equity or contact Andrew Robinson via https://questagame.com/contact-us