InSoil X Key Carbon EUR 100M Deal Powers Europe’s Shift to Regenerative Agriculture

• InSoil and Key Carbon signed a EUR 100M deal to expand regenerative agriculture across Europe
• Farmers receive 0% Green Loans in exchange for a share of future carbon credits
• Key Carbon additionally invested EUR 3.7M to scale InSoil’s regenerative farming support services
• The partners’ plans include expanding climate finance and carbon credit generation across one million hectares

This June, Lithuanian climate finance company InSoil announced its strategic partnership with Key Carbon, a Vancouver-based voluntary carbon financier. The partnership presupposes a EUR 100M deal to drive the transition to regenerative agriculture across one million hectares of European farmland. As part of this agreement. Key Carbon receives royalty rights to InSoil’s Green Loans model, which provides zero-interest loans to farmers in exchange for a share of carbon credits. Additionally, Key Carbon’s EU Soil Carbon Corp invests EUR 3.7M in the expansion of InSoil’s carbon farming support services.

A Financial Opportunity Sprouts from a Conversation

InSoil (originally named HeavyFinance) emerged in 2020 following the co-founder Laimonas Noreika’s pivotal conversation with an agricultural equipment company CEO who shared a critical insight: the primary barrier to agricultural modernization was low access to capital. Additionally, a report by the European Commission came to Mr Noreika’s attention, verifying that the financial gap for farmers was over EUR 62B. His experience of founding the peer-to-peer lending platform FinBee allowed him to recognize this as a significant market opportunity that aligned perfectly with my expertise in alternative financing.

He teamed up with debt capital expert Andrius Liukaitis and business journalist Darius Verseckas to launch InSoil as a marketplace connecting debt investors directly with farmers. This approach was quickly validated through generating revenue within only two weeks of operations—a signal clearly identifying a genuine market need.

This early traction inspired the founding team’s ambition to build a global climate finance company advancing regenerative agriculture. InSoil began to provide European farmers with financing, agrotechnical support, and soil monitoring tools to improve soil health and sequester carbon. This enables sustainable practices, generates high-quality carbon credits, and fosters long-term climate resilience and profitability in agriculture.

‘Farmers are inundated with generic advice, but what truly drives change is support that’s specific to their context. Based on soil samples and field observations, we provide practical on-farm recommendations on increasing yields, optimizing fertilization and choosing cover crops to boost soil health. Our team of agronomists conduct regular field visits to discuss scientific insights of specific fields and to identify immediate, high-impact opportunities for improving soil health and yields,’ Mr Noreika states.

Sowing Seeds Europe-Wide

In 2021, InSoil rapidly expanded to Poland, Portugal, Latvia, and Bulgaria and secured Pre-Seed funding to accelerate loan issuance to EUR 16,2M across 650 loans in 2022. The next round of investment allowed the company to launch Green Loans enabling farmers to shift to more regenerative agriculture practices with 0% debt capital while generating carbon credits—creating a new revenue stream for farmers.

2024 marked InSoil’s EUR 70M AUM, reached 500,000 hectares in the Carbon Farming Program, and a team of 65 employees across multiple markets.

‘What we’ve also learned is that peer influence is a powerful driver in adopting regenerative practices. We’ve witnessed a remarkable transformation: farmers who were once dismissed as ‘weirdos’ for practicing regenerative agriculture are now becoming local leaders and influencers. These early adopters, who endured skepticism from their neighbors, are now the ones neighboring farms turn to for advice,’ Mr Noreika notices.

Rethinking Risk, Redefining Lending, and Tracking Carbon at the Root

InSoil employs a proprietary risk evaluation model that integrates data from multiple streams to ensure robust loan performance at scale. It analyzes traditional financial metrics like profitability, revenue, existing debt, and debt-to-equity ratios, among others, to assign risk ratings from A+ to C for each loan application.

Additionally, InSoil integrates agricultural intelligence, leveraging satellite imagery, soil sampling data, and public agricultural databases to verify crop types, assess yield potential, and understand soil quality. This combination of financial and agricultural due diligence allows for more informed lending decisions and more precise calculations of carbon sequestration potential.

To track the regenerative impact of its client farmers, InSoil follows Verra VM0042 verification framework and employs a measurement protocol that begins with establishing baseline soil carbon levels through comprehensive sampling. The team conducts regular follow-up soil sampling to quantify carbon sequestration increases over time. This data validates the environmental impact for carbon credit generation, provides farmers with concrete evidence of soil health improvements, and helps InSoil refine its regenerative agriculture recommendations.

A Partnership Rooted in Carbon Revenue

According to Key Carbon’s co-founder and CEO Luke Leslie, InSoil stood out to them as the clear first-mover in this space with an end-to-end infrastructure to engage with farmers, assess their financing needs, monitor and track regenerative agriculture implementation, and work with trusted third-party verifiers to validate carbon credits.

‘Importantly, InSoil is already operating in alignment with upcoming regulatory requirements such as the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, which enhances the credibility and marketability of their credits,’ Mr Leslie notes.

This partnership involves no equity dilution—it’s structured purely as project financing and debt capital provision.

As per the agreement between InSoil and Key Carbon, the latter’s subsidiary EU Soil Carbon Corp invests in the former’s business expansion, securing the investor’s royalty rights to carbon credits generated through InSoil’s carbon farming projects. This creates a direct revenue-sharing model based on measurable environmental impact.

EUR 100M is Key Carbon’s investment in 0% debt financing for farmers through InSoil’s Green Loans. Key Carbon’s returns come from a portion of the carbon credits generated by participating farmers, creating a win-win structure: farmers access capital at unprecedented rates while Key Carbon benefits from carbon credit revenues.

‘With this partnership, we are aiming to reach 1M hectares in our Carbon Farming Program in 2026. Additionally, we are expecting to issue 1.2M credits on an annual basis from 2027. It includes growth in our existing markets and potential expansion to other European countries,’ Mr Noreika tells ITKeyMedia.

‘Through the partnership, Key Carbon will receive verified carbon credits, representing sequestered CO2 through regenerative agriculture, and offer them to our network of corporate buyers looking for high-integrity, removal-based carbon credits. We continue to see the increasing demand from corporations to achieve net-zero commitments and comply with EU regulations,’ Mr Leslie adds.

Regenerative farming is obviously essential for restoring soil health, sequestering carbon, and strengthening agriculture against climate change. The EUR 100M partnership between InSoil and Key Carbon exemplifies how Green Loans—zero-interest financing tied to carbon credit revenue—accelerates such green transition across one million hectares of European farmland. By aligning financial incentives with measurable environmental outcomes, the deal sets a new standard for scalable, impact-driven agricultural transformation.