Evergrow: The World's First Carbon Offtake Company
Urgency and velocity are necessary components to drive execution. All around us, we hear, see, and experience signals that climate change is not only an urgent issue, but also an ever increasing one. And yet, major global institutions have not been able to identify and execute promising solutions. Why has there been no velocity despite this urgency? The answer, of course, is money.
A lack of financing will stump the growth of many industries such as the public sector and the creator economy. When markets for capital and funding are enabled through technology, a world of innovation and growth are unlocked. We’ve seen this through our investments in Promise, Built, and Sanlo. We couldn’t help but imagine how much brighter the future would look if this same unlock happened for climate projects given the pain point we discovered. It became easier to see that future when James and Luke came to us with their vision to streamline the carbon finance process and accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral economy by providing both carbon offtake agreements and capital for carbon reduction projects.
Like many of us, James and Luke deeply feel the tension between the urgency to act and the velocity of climate change. Unlike many, they are born executors obsessed with giving the carbon project community funding immediately. James is a 2nd-time founder, former Wall Street lawyer, and investor in early-stage technology, energy, and decarbonization companies while Luke brings deep data and software expertise as former founding COO of Clearbit and member of the founding team at You.com. Combined, they have the economic vision to understand the future of carbon as a commodity and the technical chops to make it a reality.
The team had learnt that traditional banks fundamentally don’t know how to underwrite the risk of carbon projects or the price of carbon in the long term because there is a profound lack of data, and naturally tooling to match, while other capital providers are searching for these signals to garner project confidence. To compensate, these banks require project developers to present offtake contracts before funding them. The insight James and Luke found from their research is that this is a band aid solution — offtake contracts for carbon are very hard to come by. Queue, the Evergrow pitch mentioned above.
That’s why we’re incredibly proud to announce our partnership with Evergrow as a board member and co-lead in their $7M seed round alongside our good friends Congruent Ventures and participation from First Round Capital, Garuda Ventures, MCJ Collective, Skyview Ventures and incredible angels from the carbon, technology, and asset management industries, including Peter Reinhardt (CEO, Charm Industrial), Maddie Hall (CEO, Living Carbon), and Karen Karniol-Tambour (Co-CIO for Sustainability Investing, Bridgewater Associates).
Rebuilding the basic financial infrastructure that have traditionally governed our lives in modern society in hopes of a better future is certainly no easy feat, but we are confident that James and Luke can move from urgency to execution and unlock this ever-growing ;) $272B global market.
