Since last year, at least 40 companies at the intersection
of climate, carbon-tracking and finance have pulled in $475 million in known
funding, per Crunchbase data (see list below). The overwhelming majority of
funding has been at seed or early-stage, which portends that there’s
significantly more money to come as these companies scale.
February saw one of the largest funding rounds in the space
with San Francisco-based Watershed, a developer of software for companies to
measure their carbon emissions and drive them to zero. The startup, which
counts Airbnb, DoorDash and Shopify among its customers, pulled in $70 million
in a Series B round co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
Watershed’s financing stands out in particular because of
the valuation set for the company, which is $1 billion. It’s a remarkably high
number for a 3-year-old company that raised its Series A just a year ago, and
an unusually rapid ascent from nascent startup to unicorn.
Beyond Watershed, other big rounds in recent months include:
Xpansiv, a marketplace for ESG commodities, announced $115
million in new financing since last year from backers including Clean Energy
Finance Corp. and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Persefoni, a Tempe, Arizona-based startup offering a SaaS
platform for companies and financial institutions to meet climate disclosure
requirements and requests, raised $101 million in an October Series B financing
led by Prelude Ventures and The Rise Fund.
Patch Technologies, developer of an API for carbon removal,
raised $20.8 million in a September Series A led by Coatue. Last February, it
closed on $4.5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Measurement and compliance are a big focus in multiple
recent funding rounds. The broad pitch is that for companies seeking investors’
favor for their sustainability-minded policies, it doesn’t help if you can’t
tally up results.
Startups are betting it will prove to be an enormous market.
Persefoni, in its last funding announcement, predicted that: “carbon and
climate disclosures will be the biggest compliance market since the advent of
Sarbanes Oxley and GDPR,” two regulatory initiatives that have required copious
compliance investment.
The uptick in investment precedes the latest dire warning on
the dangers of climate change from the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.This week, in a new report, the organization warned that: “Human-induced
climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and
affecting the lives of billions of people around the world,” adding that:
“People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit.”
Developers of carbon footprint accounting tools and
environmentally friendly finance apps aren’t going to single-handedly save
coral reefs, of course. But they do address one key component of the problem,
which is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
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