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Detailed information on Mycelia

Information on pricing, technical details, and terms and conditions, to assist in procurement.

Purpose of this page

This page gathers all the key details about Mycelia in one place. It’s focused mainly on technical and legal details to assist procurement processes.

If you’d like to learn more about what Mycelia does, and hear from Local Authorities using it, please take a look at our page about Mycelia.

If you need any information which isn’t covered here, or you’d like to ask us any other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing mycelia@verna.earth.

Contents of this page

Introduction to Mycelia and Verna

Why Mycelia is needed

What Mycelia does

Terms and conditions

Technical details

Verna’s company details and financial status

Introduction to Mycelia and Verna

Mycelia is a software tool that helps local government teams drive better environmental outcomes in less time. It includes end-to-end support for every aspect of the Biodiversity Net Gain process – from validation and assessment, to monitoring and reporting.

It has been developed through collaborative research involving ecologists at more than 40 Local Authorities. It aims to help you drive better outcomes, with less stress and more control.

Mycelia is developed and maintained by Verna, a software company focused on positive climate and nature impact. We were set up by sector specialists (including a former head of climate change mitigation at Defra), and have supported many public sector bodies including Defra, DESNZ, the Environment Agency, and National Highways.

Why Mycelia is needed

We built Mycelia because we want to help Local Planning Authorities benefit from Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG).

BNG is a great opportunity to create better local environments, improve outcomes for citizens, and potentially generate revenue to support Authorities’ activities.

But BNG also brings new responsibilities and risks. We did a year’s research, engaging with over 40 Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) as well as expert stakeholders such as the Planning Advisory Service and the Association of Local Government Ecologists. We found the biggest concerns are:

We’ve designed Mycelia to help with these challenges. The software is based on our research and has been co-developed with a working group of seven LPAs, and we will continue to improve and refine it collaboratively with the sector.

In time, we want Mycelia to help with all ecology and environment processes within LPAs. We’re starting with BNG because it’s new and brings significant risks and burdens, but Mycelia already includes support for some other aspects of ecology and we will increase its wider functionality over time.

What Mycelia does

Mycelia helps with data management and assessment at every stage of the BNG process. It provides a home for every BNG case – from validation and assessment, to monitoring and reporting – and aggregated reports across all cases.

It enables you to:

As far as we’re aware, Mycelia is the only solution around that’s tailor-made to support the ecology elements of planning. It’s designed to work alongside, not replace, general purpose planning case management software.

Some of Mycelia’s ecology-specific features include:

You can learn a bit more about what Mycelia does, and hear from Local Authorities using it, on our page about Mycelia.

Please also feel free to email us on mycelia@verna.earth. We can show you a demo and answer any questions.

Terms and conditions

We’ve tried to make the terms on which we offer Mycelia as friendly to LPAs as possible. We want to help make BNG work for LPAs, and to do that best Mycelia needs to be easy to adopt.

You can read the standard Mycelia contract here (opens in new tab). If, after speaking to us, you’d like to use the software, we’ll send you a version tailored to your LPA for signing.

The key terms in the contract include:

Pricing

The standard price is:

This is a flat fee per LPA: you can have any number of user logins, all within the single fee.

This fee includes, at no additional cost, an allowance of 50 gigabytes of data storage. If you build up more than 50 gigabytes of data stored on Mycelia, then at renewal there will be an additional data fee which passes onto you the cost to Verna of storing and handling the extra data (at cost i.e. with no profit for Verna). The exact cost will depend on how much data you upload per case, and how cloud data costs vary in the future. But to give a rough idea, 50 gigabytes might equate to around 1000 cases managed on Mycelia, and each additional 50 gigabytes / 1000 cases might cost around £100 per year.

Contract length

The initial contract term is 12 months.

Renewal

You have a right to renew the contract every 12 months, but no obligation to do so. You can cancel the contract at any time.

If you renew, by default the price can only increase in line with inflation.

The only circumstances in which an above-inflation increase can occur are:

Offboarding

If you choose to stop using Mycelia at any point in the future, we will provide assistance with moving your data out of Mycelia so that you have it available for future use.

Support

Support is included at no extra cost.

This includes email and phone support, continuously available during standard working hours.

Privacy

Verna is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (reference number ZA784487), and we are fully GDPR compliant.

The privacy provisions in the Mycelia terms and conditions are GDPR compliant. Mycelia only stores personal data uploaded by the LPA, for its own use and records.

If you’d like more detail on anything related to terms and conditions, please feel free to email us on mycelia@verna.earth.

Technical details

This section aims to provide the information you need to be confident that Mycelia is a sound software product from a technical perspective. If you’d like any further information, feel free to email us on mycelia@verna.earth.

Cloud solution

Mycelia is a fully cloud-based service, accessed through a web browser. It does not require the installation of any applications on local devices.

We deliver Mycelia using large, mainstream cloud providers, to ensure resilience and security. Our main provider is fly.io, a mainstream provider used by large companies all over the world across 34 regions each with multiple datacentres.

System requirements

Mycelia helps with tasks that users typically carry out at their desks, so its interface is designed for use on desktops and laptops.

Mycelia will work well with up-to-date versions of mainstream browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari.

Uptime and resilience

We aim for 100% uptime, outside of maintenance periods which we schedule out of working hours and let you know about in advance.

We take a wide range of measures to ensure resilience of the service, including:

Security

We take security extremely seriously. Mycelia’s design incorporates a wide range of industry best practices to ensure security, including:

Verna’s company details and financial status

Verna is a limited company registered in England and Wales, with details:

Verna is a robust company. We have a 3+ year track record of commercial success, including delivery of services to large public sector bodies such as Defra, DESNZ, the Environment Agency, the Ministry of Justice, and National Highways. We are backed by investors including Octopus Ventures, one of the largest technology investors in Europe.

We treat our suppliers well, and are signatories to the Prompt Payment Code.