Most forestry technology being built right now starts with a camera and a promise: point your phone at a tree, get an instant measurement, let AI handle the rest.
We're building toward that too. But we didn't start there — and we think that was the right call.
The problem nobody's writing about
Ask anyone who's actually run a teak export operation what eats their week, and it's rarely the measuring. It's everything after the measuring.
It's a field team standing at a loading dock, calculating Hoppus volume by hand, container by container, log by log. It's those numbers getting written on paper, then retyped into a spreadsheet back at the office — often by someone who wasn't there to catch a mistake. It's a plantation owner finding out three days later that a container went out short, because the field data and the office data were never actually the same data.
None of that needs AI to fix. It needs the basics done properly.
What we actually built
ForwoodAI's packing list system does the unglamorous work correctly:
- Automated Hoppus CBM calculation — gross and net, per log, per container.
- Real-time team sharing — a field worker logs a container on their phone, and it's already there when the office opens the same list on a browser.
- Container-level detail that matters for export — loading date, place, measurer name, truck number, seal number.
- Works on a phone and a browser, built for people who need it in a plantation, not a demo.
It's not exciting. It's also not nothing — for a crew doing this by hand every week, it's real hours back, and fewer mistakes reaching a shipment.
Why this came before the AI part
We're building AR-based trunk measurement next — point a phone's camera at a trunk, get a real girth reading using the phone's own depth sensing, not a guess dressed up as one. That work is underway.
But we'd rather ship the thing that's genuinely finished than the thing that sounds more impressive. A measurement tool means nothing if the business process around it — the packing list, the export paperwork, the team actually agreeing on the numbers — is still broken. So we fixed that part first.
What's next
More field tools, built the same way: solve a real, specific problem completely, say plainly what's done and what isn't, and let the product speak before the pitch does.
If you're running tropical hardwood operations and packing lists, CBM calculations, or field-to-office coordination are eating more of your week than they should — we'd like to hear how you're handling it today.