Focused Research Organization
Echo Labs
Echo Labs is building the scientific infrastructure to represent the natural world — making ecosystem condition measurable enough to model, compare, and forecast as a dynamic, quantifiable property.
- Type
- Focused Research Organization (FRO)
- Backing
- £7m initial award from ARIA
- Founder + CEO
- Kaja Wasik, PhD
- Launched
- 21 April 2026
- Partners
- Convergent Research + ARIA
- Alignment
- Scoping Our Planet + Engineering Ecosystem Resilience
The mission
Echo Labs is building new scientific infrastructure for ecological monitoring and forecasting: making ecosystem condition more measurable and forecastable through new combinations of environmental data, models, and software. The goal is a live, multimodal model of ecosystem condition — capable of quantifying resilience and forecasting change.
Why an FRO?
The Focused Research Organization model is a new way to build scientific institutions around specific technical bottlenecks that are too engineering-heavy, operationally complex, or long-horizon for conventional labs or startups to address effectively. Echo Labs was launched with Convergent Research and ARIA to take on exactly that kind of bottleneck for ecosystem science.
Where it sits
Echo Labs is aligned with two ARIA opportunity spaces: Scoping Our Planet (planetary measurement) and Engineering Ecosystem Resilience. Its monitoring-and-forecasting mission complements several of the sensing-focused opportunity seeds in this space — such as the Internet of Birds, the Ecological Stethoscope, 3DTreePrint, and AMBIANCE.
Ecosystems underpin our economies and societies, but we still lack the scientific infrastructure to measure and forecast ecological condition with anything like the precision we bring to other natural or engineered systems.