Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on innovative solutions to mitigate carbon emissions. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we decided to share our insights with you. This time, we are taking a look at 5 promising carbon accounting startups.
Heat Map: 5 Top Carbon Accounting Startups
Using our StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, covering 1.379.000+ startups & scaleups globally, we looked at innovation in the field of carbon emissions management. For this research, we identified 158 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and relevance of technology, among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.
The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 startups & scaleups developing carbon accounting and offsetting solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 158 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.
Cloverly – Carbon Offsetting For Businesses
All business activities, whether it is a product or a service, directly or indirectly produce carbon emissions. Digital services utilize energy-intensive servers, emissions from the manufacturing of any product, as well as services that utilize some form of energy. Moreover, there is a consensus that humans cannot achieve absolute zero-emissions. This drives emerging environment-focused startups to provide solutions for businesses to at least achieve carbon neutrality.
Cloverly is a US-based startup that offers a sustainability-as-a-service platform to offset carbon emissions for businesses. The startup’s application programming interface (API) calculates emissions and matches it, in real-time, with suitable carbon offset projects. For example, the Cloverly API calculates emissions from flights or vehicle fleets to offset the impact of the activity.
Veridium Lab – Natural Capital Markets
Environmental assets are playing an increasingly larger role in capital markets. International agreements, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, highlight the role of natural capital markets in fighting global warming. Startups and scaleups are developing novel market mechanisms that are transparent and based on standardized carbon accounting rules.
Hong Kong-based startup Veridium Labs is creating a blockchain-based tokenized marketplace for carbon trading. The startup’s EcoSmart protocol enables companies to offset the environmental impact of their activities in a transparent manner. The solution also allows carbon-emitting companies to account for the cost of offsetting in their products and services.
Tomorrow – Electricity Carbon Footprint Measurement
Many businesses today are still unaware of their carbon footprint, and hence, make no effort to offset their emissions. A lack of understanding about carbon trading, and some key challenges in evaluating the impact of such schemes, encourage startups to find alternative solutions. Global data collection across industries, along with granular segments within them, also provide a base for tailoring and implementing carbon-reduction solutions.
Danish startup Tomorrow is building electricityMap, an API platform to measure the carbon footprint of electricity consumption. electricityMap provides access to data relating to carbon intensity and power breakdowns from more than 200 countries. Cloud computing, electric vehicle charging, and heating or cooling are some applications of the startup’s API to manage carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Clairifi – Oil & Gas Carbon Emission Management
Globally, national and subnational government organizations are drawing up strict regulations and requirements for polluting entities. For large polluting industries such as oil & gas, meeting new environmental standards poses a significant challenge. Moreover, with numerous polluting outlets from a single site, startups are applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to improve regulatory compliance.
Canadian startup Clairifi provides a cloud-based interactive platform to facilitate communication among internal teams, industry experts, and regulatory reporting systems for the oil & gas sector. The platform offers real-time insights and projections by quantifying monthly fuel, flare, vent, and emission rates. Further, the platform automatically creates compliance reports for multiple regulatory requirements. These include compliance relating to greenhouse gases (GHG), national pollutant release inventory (NPRI), multi-sector air pollutant regulations (MSAPR), and methane reduction requirements.
Carbon Grid Protocol – Carbon Offsetting For Blockchain Networks
Increasingly, blockchain technology is being used in numerous industries from finance, logistics, healthcare, and energy. However, blockchain transactions currently utilize significant amounts of energy, resulting in high amounts of carbon emissions. This encourages startups and scaleups to develop solutions to offset emissions arising from employing blockchain technology.
Carbon Grid is a Singapore-based startup aiming to decarbonize blockchain technology. The startup’s Carbon Grid Protocol, CGRID, creates an economic framework to reward blockchain networks and decentralized applications (dApps) for offsetting their carbon footprint. CGRID creates a complementary protocol layer that provides economic incentives to blockchain developers to access carbon credits and maintain carbon neutrality.
What About The Other 153 Solutions?
While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence and enable you to achieve your goals faster. The 5 carbon accounting solutions showcased above are promising examples out of 158 we analyzed for this article. To identify the most relevant solutions based on your specific criteria, get in touch.
