Canopy is a pan-African conservation intelligence and finance platform covering all 54 African countries and 200 key protected areas. Beyond Africa, it is adding the world’s most important protected areas from the Canopy Global 1000, starting with 331 across 32 countries in Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Built for funders, investors, operators, NGOs and governments who need to compare country risk, country conservation performance and protected area performance on the same basis before committing capital.

It does two things that are usually done apart. It is the measurement layer conservation M&E runs on, measuring what is actually happening on the ground, park by park, from orbit and from the public record, with operator disclosures read as claims rather than as outcomes. And it sets that measurement against the money: what a country costs to protect, what it currently receives, and how risky it is to fund.

The underlying information is scattered across registries, government portals, satellite archives and specialist publications. Canopy gathers it, then adds its own measurement on top.

Founders

Tony Hansen. Tony has over 30 years of experience in advising and directing complex global programmes across conservation, sustainability, infrastructure, tourism, and high-impact events. In his most recent role, he was the Director of McKinsey's Natural Capital and Nature group. Core roles included helping companies on their net-zero and nature-positive transition and assisting governments in their design and implementation of the UN's Global Biodiversity Framework. Prior to this, he was the managing director of McKinsey's Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII), a community of the world's senior leaders in infrastructure who are committed to the pursuit of smart, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure. Before joining McKinsey, Tony worked as a management consultant and entrepreneur for more than 20 years. Tony is on the advisory board of Tompkins Conservation, a global conservation organisation that creates national parks, recovers imperilled wildlife, and promotes sustainable local communities.

Ralph Lazar. Ralph is a sovereign default risk specialist by background, formerly Fixed Income Proprietary Trading at CSFB, with the firm's own capital at risk, preceded by Global Economics & Strategy at Barings and Global Equity Strategy at Goldman Sachs. University of Cape Town (Law, Econ) and LSE (MSc Econ). His current professional interests include conservation, agentic software engineering, applying large datasets and LLMs to real-world problems, and deep learning at scale.