Srikanth
Founder and CEO of WeNaturalists, founded this ecosystem with a simple motive – to give a purpose to people’s passion for nature. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, he is an ardent nature lover, wilderness explorer, and bird photographer.
Amit has led a distinguished career over two decades and spanning across sectors including successful stints with various corporate houses including Disney UTV Group and Zee Group and has founded multiple ventures in business transformation, crowdfunding, online gaming, and F&B. Amit brings extensive experience across sectors and around building businesses, global operations, strategy, and finance including M&As, fundraising, and IPOs. He has been instrumental in shaping several businesses across their lifecycle, raising over USD 2bn across geographies, and managing a USD 200mn fund during this time.
A critical milestone in his life occurred while he was working with Zarina and Ronnie Screwvala’s Swades Foundation, on holistic living projects in rural India. It was here that he realized the need for mankind to coexist with nature, and more importantly, our dependence on it. The learnings from these interventions reinforced his belief that our interaction with nature needs to evolve to create a larger impact. This tremendously influenced his outlook towards creating WeNaturalists.
Idea behind WeNaturalists
Across the globe, people are tirelessly working to conserve, preserve and protect nature. Their actions have a huge impact. However it’s scattered. Today, the world is facing a nature crisis – and one important element to make this fight stronger is an informed audience. We need to empower the right people with the right set of tools to collaborate for a unified and larger impact. WeNaturalists aims at just that.
The idea is to connect people from all geographies, backgrounds, social constructs, and disciplines. Local solutions in one part of the world can inspire other parts if one single platform can showcase solutions, facilitate dialogue and bring everyone in nature together.
What is WeNaturalists about? and its products.
WeNaturalists is about People, Passion and Possibilities in nature. It is a global ecosystem for nature professionals, experts, enthusiasts, and organizations working in nature. It empowers this community by providing customized tools that enable them to create visibility for their contribution, find new work prospects, explore learning opportunities, access relevant nature-specific content, collaborate with experts, and create a larger impact.
It is a space for over 500 million nature professionals like conservationists, wildlife professionals, field guides, researchers, content creators, and 10 million nature organizations like NGOs, educational institutions, eco-tourism businesses, charities, and eco-businesses come together in a strong, global nature-network.
By bringing people together, WeNaturalists bridges a big gap between supply and demand, while providing this community a space where they can belong. Our vision is to create the largest ecosystem for people working in nature from around the world.
Early days struggle
The biggest challenge was to understand the needs of our target audience. Brainstorming with the team on building a platform that breaks stereotypes and meets the expectations of this community was a grueling effort. And that too, in a remote work environment. We started working on WeNaturalists in November 2019, right before Covid-19 hit. It was a significant effort by the team who have worked relentlessly through the entire crisis to ensure that our vision can be materialized.
What is that one problem it solves ?
People working in nature have evolved needs related to their work, livelihood, learning, communication, and funding. And none of these evolved needs of the nature community are met by any other platform today.
These include:
- Frequent and consistent livelihood opportunities
- Access to continuous learning and upskilling
- Quality engagement with a relevant audience
- Recognition and visibility for work and contribution
- Easy and recurrent access to other professionals and experts globally
- Lack of funding environment for opportunities created
WeNaturalists, through its tech-enabled nature-network, customized tools, and nature-relevant content, solves all these problems by catering to their specific needs.
Various aspects of the brand, making a difference in today’s world
WeNaturalists, today, serves a critical gap by meeting the needs of the nature community. It fosters community participation through open, informed, and effective communication, leading to a strong sense of belonging.
It brings the whole world of nature together and creates a unified voice. This strong voice will lead to stronger actions and reach every individual, everywhere.
This is our humble contribution to a sustainable and bright future.
User base and Expected Growth
Since the global launch, WeNaturalists has seen web traffic of over 14,500 people and over 100 organizations from 140 countries. In the coming twelve months, we plan to deepen our reach in every geography and reach more than 1 million people.
What’s their USP
The biggest USP of WeNaturalists lies in its distinguished approach, which has helped us create unique tools customized to the community’s needs. These tools can transform the lives of nature professionals and the functioning of nature organizations by taking their work, their voice, and their contribution beyond geographies and generations. The approach, the tools, and the transformation are expected to create stickiness leading to a paradigm shift in the way this community behaves.
Funding received (if any)
We are currently bootstrapped. But like any other start-up, we are in the process of raising capital and talking to investors about the sustainable business model we have created for this ecosystem.
New Areas… Future plans.
WeNaturalists is a global brand and we have reached all major geographies. The plan, moving forward, is to deepen our reach in every geography. We are also expanding our global team to help us in this venture. We plan to establish a physical presence in the US and South Africa soon.
In terms of the platform, we are working on some new and exciting features that will make this ecosystem more holistic and valuable to all members. We can say, the future is green for WeNaturalists.
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