Cycad helps people shaping, delivering, and learning from strategies that make the world better — across conservation, international development, philanthropy, and beyond — with AI-enhanced software, practitioner-led training, and expert consulting. We believe rigorous thinking about cause and effect deserves tools as thoughtful as the work itself.
Across development, conservation, and adjacent sectors, the same pattern shows up again and again: sector-specific tools handle a domain's structure but lack real collaboration and AI; general-purpose tools flatten structured problems into diagrams and spreadsheets; and many practitioners have had limited formal training in the frameworks their work depends on. One clear example is program logic — the results chains, logframes, and theories of change behind hundreds of millions of dollars in development and conservation spending — where those gaps are well documented.
Three integrated offerings — software, training, and consulting — that reinforce one another in service of better-reasoned, better-evidenced programs.
Our software studio, building AI-enhanced decision-support and analysis tools on structured data and processes. Its flagship product is Frame, a customizable demonstration platform for developing, strengthening, and monitoring program results chains and theories of change (currently in beta).
Courses, workshops, and bespoke organizational coaching spanning integrated landscape management, ecosystem services assessment, project and program monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems, and adaptive management — delivered independently of any one tool.
Expert consultancy in program design, monitoring, evaluation, and learning frameworks, adaptive management, and blended finance approaches, drawing on 30+ years of field experience across development and conservation.
Program designers and leads at development and conservation organizations — NGOs, donor programs, and their consultancies — and private-sector teams applying R&D, remote sensing, safeguards, and climate expertise across landscape management and agricultural supply chains. What they share is the same need: logic clear enough to design against, monitor honestly, and learn from over time.
Project management moved from spreadsheets to Asana; code collaboration moved from email to GitHub. That same shift toward structured, AI-assisted tools hasn't yet reached many of the domains Cycad works in — program logic, for one, is still largely built in slide decks and static diagrams. Cycad is positioned to lead that transition, built by practitioners who've experienced these gaps firsthand.
Dr. Peter (Pete) Cutter is an applied conservation practitioner and program-management specialist with 30+ years of experience across Asia-Pacific, the United States, and East Africa, guiding teams applying structured conservation-planning and results-based frameworks in large donor-funded programs with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, GEF, WWF, NatureServe, SERVIR-Mekong (USAID/NASA), and RECOFTC.
Cycad is actively seeking donors, implementing organizations, research institutions, private-sector partners, and technology collaborators to build solutions to the complex challenges facing development, conservation, and adjacent fields. If your organization is grappling with these problems, we want to talk.
info@cycad.eco