How One Entrepreneur Is Making Land Easier to Save
From a corner booth in a Michigan McDonald's, Custis Coleman (BS ‘17) (MBA ’25) launched Land Credit, a software as a service platform that simplifies conservation tax credit sales in Virginia.
What began as a family decision to preserve his grandfather’s 300-acre farm in Lexington, Virginia has evolved into a mission-driven tech venture for Coleman. Inspired by his family's conservation efforts and his friendship with a land easement broker, Coleman used his background in systems engineering to develop a digital solution to a tedious manual process.
He noticed that his friend was spending countless hours driving miles to collect checks and signatures to meet end-of-year deadlines. “At one point, he drove 20 miles just to knock on the door of a dentist’s office and ask, ‘Hey, can you pay for the credit?’ so he could file it in time,” Coleman said. “I thought, that’s an unnecessary problem. Do you think we could solve that?”
After completing his undergraduate degree in 2017, Coleman moved to Missoula, Montana, where he worked for a young company that specialized in outdoor recreation maps. He played a crucial role in the product side, focusing on measuring, tracking, and improving various aspects of the business. After five years, his physician wife’s residency at the UVA Medical Center brought him back to Charlottesville, and he enrolled at Darden a year later.
At Darden, Coleman explored a few entrepreneurial ideas, but trying to address the problems he saw with managing the land credit process was the one that really inspired him and gained momentum. He recently won first place and a $20,000 prize in the UVA Entrepreneurship Cup Launch Competition, organized by The Foundry, UVA Innovates’ hub for entrepreneurial students. He was also a winner in the Concept and Discovery E-Cup phases. Open to all UVA students and postdoctoral fellows, the annual E-Cup encourages new ventures that have the potential to address unmet needs and solve social and economic problems in an interdisciplinary way.
Coleman credits the UVA entrepreneurship community for giving him the confidence to pursue his idea full-time after he picks up his MBA this month. “It’s scary to take the jump,” Coleman said. “But when you have mentors, professors, and friends showing up to support you, it feels more doable. The process of iterating, getting feedback, and sharing ideas at the E-Cup was incredibly helpful. The biggest surprise in this process was realizing you don't need everything to start a company. It's about asking the right questions.”
Coleman is quick to emphasize that his goal isn’t to replace brokers with software—it’s to empower them.
“I like to think of it as being the rails for conservation credit transfer,” Coleman said. “By enabling these brokers, you’re actually helping them do more of what they love, which is putting more land into conservation.”
As Coleman continues to grow his platform, he remains grounded in the values that sparked his journey. “It feels great to be providing a service that I feel fundamentally aligned with—one that protects land, supports brokers, and benefits society.”
His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs? “You will never have all the answers, and you will never have all the resources. But you don’t need them” Coleman said. “You just need to start.”