Ryan Orbuch is a Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where he leads the firm’s work in carbon removal. His September 2026 essay Natural General Intelligence proposed the framework by that name: a foundation model grounded in the state and dynamics of the planet itself, trained on the accumulated output of the global Earth-observing system, whose purpose is stewardship of the biosphere and its couplings. The essay supplies the corpus with its most developed statement of the sensory apparatus and integrating intelligence that the BioConomy inherits from the acceleration phase of the human S-curve.
Trajectory
Orbuch grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where his interest in weather and the natural world began early. He designed Finish, an Apple Design Award-winning productivity app for students, while still in high school. He co-founded Volley, an education software startup, before joining Stripe in 2018 as a product manager. When Stripe committed in 2019 to purchasing carbon removal, Orbuch initiated and led the procurement program that has since been widely regarded as the industry benchmark, developing the partnerships with Activate and Deep Science Ventures and recruiting the scientific expert review panel that underwrote Stripe’s early portfolio. He joined Lowercarbon Capital as a partner after leaving Stripe in 2021, and has spoken to the National Academy of Sciences, the California Air Resources Board, and the broader carbon-removal community on the state of the field. He contributed to the CDR Primer.
His movement from productivity software to climate procurement to venture investment to Earth-system modeling traces a specific arc: from digital coordination toward planetary coordination, always with the working assumption that the substrate for coordination has to be re-engineered rather than merely optimized inside its existing form.
Contribution to the corpus
Orbuch’s contribution to the BioConomy corpus is the framing of the observing system as a fifty-year civilizational accumulation whose latent value has yet to be realized. His essay’s central move is to name the gap between what humanity has already built (the sensory organs of the planet) and what humanity has yet to build (the central nervous system that would let those organs act as one intelligence). That framing supplies the technical backbone for the BioPlace layer and the “data about the community and the bioregion” stream of sensor-response money.
The essay is not a monetary argument. Orbuch treats stewardship as its own justification and stops short of specifying the coordination architecture that would enable stewardship at scale. The BioConomy corpus takes his infrastructure argument and grafts the coordination architecture onto it. His writing is therefore a foundational input rather than a foundational agreement. He may or may not endorse the extensions made here.
His design principles for a nature model translate directly into design principles for bioregional sensing and interpretation infrastructure: learn from direct observations, keep full resolution, obey known physics, discover latent couplings, and steer sensor deployment by expected information gain. Each principle has a bioregional counterpart in how a BFF would set the measurement basis for its currency issuance.
Positioning in lineage
Orbuch sits in a lineage that runs from Alexander von Humboldt (whose Naturgemälde he cites as inspiration) through Charles Darwin, Robert FitzRoy, James Lovelock, and the twentieth-century atmospheric and Earth-system scientists who built the observing infrastructure his essay proposes to fully utilize. Where his predecessors extended the aperture of observation, Orbuch proposes to close the loop between observation and intervention through a general-purpose learned model.
For the BioConomy corpus, this positions him alongside the theorists whose work concerns the substrate of coordination rather than its content: David Ronfeldt on the +N form, Michel Bauwens on cosmo-local production, Elisabet Sahtouris on juvenile-to-mature civilizational transition. His specific offering is the technical account of how a planet-scale coordination intelligence could actually be built, and what data it would need to learn from.
Related entries
natural-general-intelligence · the-bioplace-layer · sensor-response-money · carbon-silicon-partnership · Stewardship · three-futures · bioregional-financing-facility