Carbon removal, technology that aims to remove carbon emissions from the environment by breaking it down into something less harmful, received widespread attention last year after Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Alphabet among others collectively agreed to inject $1 billion in startups aimed at this purpose. A London startup called isometric He hopes to give some structure to that nascent industry. The startup launches with $25 million, one of the largest seed rounds this year for a climate startup.
Lowercarbon Capital and Plural are the co-investors in this round, along with Niklas Zennström (co-founder of Skype and founder of VC Atomico), David Helgason (founder of Unity Technologies), Ross Mason (founder of MuleSoft) and Ilkka Paananen (founder of Supercell) .
Isometric will use the funding both to hire more scientists and technologists and to work on its products. Chief among them is a carbon removal registry to provide data to companies, which are looking to purchase removal credits, from the various startups developing that technology. Isometric claims it will be the first registry of “high-quality, long-lasting” carbon removal credits.
More immediately, today it is launching what it calls a “science platform,” which will provide a way for carbon removal companies to publish and share their data with those interested in seeing it, and for the Isometric team itself. do more things firsthand.
Some of the first carbon removal startups at Isometric will include Charm Industrial (bio-oil specialist); Eion (focusing on rock weathering); Planetary (improving ocean alkalinity) and Brilliant Planet (microalgae).
Charm recently announced a large tranche of carbon removal sales to JPMorgan, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Alphabet, McKinsey and more totaling $50 million. Isometric said its science team has been “independently reviewing historically delivered tons” for Charm, and has published them on the new science platform.
Eamon Jubbawy, the founder and CEO of Isometric, is a recurring entrepreneur in the world London tech hub with its startups ranging from other climate jobs even entrepreneurial businesses.
He co-founded identity verification startup Onfido (which has been backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from many investors); and, more recently, he also co-founded Sequence, a financial trading platform (younger, but also backed by big names like Andreessen Horowitz). He also co-founded recycling company Safi (previously known as TrueCircle).
He said Isometric is addressing a specific gap that has been identified in the market.
Carbon offsetting has been a popular route taken by companies that want to contribute something positive to the environment while continuing to operate their businesses, but it is also fraught with flaws. critics have pointed out the fact that the exchanges do not really address the root causes of pollution and carbon emissions, and that many of the projects, unregulated or not, could lack value.
“I was looking at carbon markets and how poorly they work,” he said in an interview, “and I saw the thinking starting to change around them and the belief that more drastic change was needed.”
That has led many in the industry to look for alternatives and add-ons to offsetting, and carbon removal has become one of the key areas of attention, helped in large part by the efforts of Stripe and its Initiative co-investors. Frontier, as well as Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), y Microsoft to incorporate elimination into their own ESG strategies.
But given the relatively recent state of carbon removal, and some of the learnings about more widespread carbon offset “traps,” there is an opportunity to provide some structure and order around how removal credits are counted, and examine what the companies claim about said elimination.
While there are registries for carbon offsetting, Jubbawy believes carbon removal requires a new approach.
“The existing carbon registries failed so badly that the only real option was to build another platform to fix all that, focused on removal,” he said.
To be clear, there are still some important conditions around carbon removal. Much of the technology that companies build and apply has not yet been tested on a large scale.
And there are definite leaps of faith that must be accepted about how it might work; for example, models that are based on decades of storing biofuels underground, but on the other hand the company that develops that technique is only a few years old. .
On the other hand, the technology and order that Jubbaway and Isometric hope to bring to the space, researching and making their work more transparent to potential clients and researchers, could be a significant step in separating what works and what doesn't.
