With the climate crisis looming, many companies want to do their part. But asking customers to “offset the CO2 emission from this delivery” is usually a hammer to crack a nut. There is very little transparency around carbon offsets. In addition, smaller companies want to access high-quality carbon credits but calculate their impact at the product, service, and transaction level and be able to buy a fraction of a carbon credit instead of a wildly inaccurate “scheme.”
The promise is a startup that targets industries such as freight, passenger, travel, and last-mile delivery, where customers can be introduced to how to add offsets to their transactions.
It has now raised a $ 4.5 million seed round led by Visionaries Club with the participation of Lowercarbon Capital and Chris Sacca’s Zinal Growth, the investment vehicle of Guillaume Pousaz (founder and CEO of Checkout.com). Pledge has been operating in closed beta until now.
Founded by early Revolut employees David de Picciotto and Thomas Lucas and Freetrade co-founder and former CTO André Mohamed, Pledge will start with logistics and transportation. Pledge says companies will measure and mitigate their shipments, trips, deliveries, or trips to achieve carbon neutrality by integrating the API Pledge. The platform aims to provide customers with analysis, information, and recommendations on reducing their emissions over time.
Pledge says its emissions calculations will follow global standards, including the GHG protocol, GLEC framework, and ICAO methodology, complying with ISO standards.
The key to it all is that Pledge says its platform will allow companies to buy a fraction of a carbon credit (similar to retail investors who buy a fraction of a share) while offering access to balanced portfolios that span different methodologies and geographies (similar to ETFs).
David de Picciotto, Co-Founder, and CEO of Pledge, said: “Currently, there is no easy and scalable way for companies of any size to understand and eliminate their emissions. Traditional carbon measurement and offset solutions are expensive and difficult to implement and are therefore only accessible to a restricted group of larger companies. We started the Pledge to enable any business to launch high-quality, verified climate products as easily and quickly as possible. “
Robert Lacher, Co-Founder, and Partner of Visionaries Club said: “Pledge is to build conduits for any company to launch applications to measure and mitigate their environmental impact. Like the flood of financial infrastructure providers enabling any company to become a fintech, Pledge will become the enabler of climate initiatives by providing the relevant software infrastructure and tools to build on top of them. “
Clay Dumas, Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, added: “The biggest bottleneck to scaling carbon removal will be connecting supply with demand. The Pledge team is applying what they learned in building the world’s best financial products to unlock euros, dollars, and pounds to suck carbon out of the sky. “
While working at a large private equity firm and sitting next to the ESG team, Picciotto says that he saw firsthand the growing number of applications from LPs, mainly pension funds, requesting greater transparency and reporting on ESG and, specifically, the portfolio’s climate KPIs. Companies. He realized that there must be a way to simplify this report/calculation and access high-quality carbon credits, providing more transparency and tools for internal and external stakeholders.
“The more we looked at the mechanisms on which the carbon market has been built, the more parallels we saw with the financial services industry. Our research began with the belief that our experience in founding or helping to build class-leading companies such as Freetrade and Revolut could provide a unique angle to help reverse climate change, ”he said.
