Banking Sucks, so we Made it Great. Now let’s Fix Carbon.
We started looking into the climate space because time is running out, and because the magnitude of the impact we could have in this $300bn market is too big to be ignored. As the IPCC, the UN body assessing the science related to climate change, warned last August: “This is code red for humanity.”
Our research kicked off with the belief that our experience founding and building category-leading companies, such as Freetrade and Revolut, has parallels with building a company that will work to reverse climate change. The more we looked into the mechanisms on which the carbon market has been built, the more similarities we saw with the financial services industry. We founded Pledge a few months ago, built a stellar team and confirmed our initial hypothesis by developing a product that is actively used by customers.
Today we’re excited to announce that Pledge is coming out of stealth with the closing of a $4.5m seed round to accelerate our growth. Pledge makes it simple for businesses of every size to understand and manage the climate impact of their products. By providing tools and infrastructure, we automate the delivery of climate solutions — such as footprint measurement, reduction and offsetting — into customer journeys. To support us on this mission, we welcome forward-thinking investors including Visionaries Club, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Breyer Capital and Guillaume Pousaz (founder & CEO of Checkout.com).
From embedded finance to embedded climate
Over the last decade there has been a wave of advances in the financial services industry that has transformed the way in which software is built and serviced — gone are the days of slow, centralized systems that operate in silos. Today, the most advanced businesses are powered by an array of microservices and APIs that help build world-class products cheaper, faster, and better.
In Fintech, this wave of innovation has been powered by companies unbundling the banking stack by rebuilding single product lines with new technologies detached from legacy systems. These infrastructure players, typically operating behind the scenes and not visible to the end-client, are now the backbone powering your digital wallets, credit card, loans and are processing your transactions. These companies have enabled developer communities to build applications on top of this newly created infrastructure thereby displacing bankers as the conduit to financial innovation. The friction underpinning the provision of and access to financial services has been stripped away. Notably, these companies are becoming many of the most important companies of our generation. The ability to launch fintech products in a matter of hours or days as opposed to months or years has given rise to what is now commonly referred to as “embedded fintech” — the integration of financial services into virtually every business and customer journey.
Pledge is on a similar path, applying our fintech learnings to the carbon market and building the infrastructure that powers “embedded climate” for businesses of every size. Why is that relevant?
First, we believe that in the near future every company will have to report on their environmental (and wider sustainability) footprint. Ultimately, they will also be required to take action in order to reduce and neutralise their climate impact. Drivers include increasing regulatory pressure (seen across both geographies and industries), greater collective awareness for climate change as well as the intrinsic motivation of company builders, executives and employees to drive change, for good.
Second, both the financial services and carbon industries have long been criticized for their difficulty of access and their opacity. For example, the lack of global standards in the carbon market makes it hard for companies without prior knowledge in the space to understand this complex system and what the benefits really are.
Finally, the high cost, minimum volume requirements and manual processes to traditionally measure and offset footprints with high quality carbon offsets have created incremental friction in the market. This has deterred (smaller) companies from entering the space and taking action on their climate impact.
Applying our fintech learnings and experience to climate
We decided to dig deeper and use our collective experience of democratizing access to investments as well as re-inventing the way we manage our money and pay, to unlock the adoption of climate solutions at scale. These experiences include building Europe’s first fractional and commission-free trading platforms at both Revolut and Freetrade, helping scale Revolut to unicorn status and beyond, as well as supporting financial infrastructure players such as Belvo in LatAm or Stitch in Africa as investors since day 1. Each of the above examples have allowed us to gain further insights and develop our thesis on how to approach this gigantic, global and pressing challenge. We’ve translated these learnings into actionable insights with the goal of building a category-defining business over the coming years, and more. Examples include:
Akin to open banking players powering critical solutions for businesses ranging from KYC to payments initiation, we set out to build the pipes to enable companies of every size to seamlessly access high quality climate solutions. These include robust footprint measurement tools and verified carbon removal offsets to understand and manage the climate impact of their products in the easiest and fastest way possible.
By applying a similar approach to purchasing carbon credits as we did to stocks at Revolut, Pledge is fractionalising access to carbon offsets and allowing businesses to only buy what they need. In addition, we offer portfolios encompassing a range of offsetting projects, removal technologies and geographies, in a similar fashion to how ETFs are constructed. That way, anyone can have access to the same services as the largest buyers in the market but without the friction.
Conclusion
We believe Pledge will play a significant role in raising climate awareness amongst businesses globally and helping accelerate their transition to net zero. What was previously only accessible to the world’s largest companies will now be made available to businesses of any size. As Clay from Lowercarbon Capital describes, “Pledge is applying what they’ve learned building the world’s top financial products to unlock euros, dollars, and pounds to suck carbon out of the sky”. Pledge is building a category-defining business by helping scale the carbon market and removing gigatons of CO2e emissions from the atmosphere — join us.
David, Thomas & André