Tech
Opna helps corporates invest in carbon removal. It just raised $6.5 million with this 11-slide pitch deck.
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- Opna, a startup that helps carbon removal projects get funded, just raised $6.5 million.
- The London-based startup hopes to become the go-to platform for carbon project financing.
- We got an exclusive look at the 11-slide pitch deck it used to raise the funds.
Shilpika Gautam is a Guinness World Record holder for the longest journey by stand-up paddleboard. From October 2016 to January 2017, she paddled the Ganges River in India to raise awareness for clean water and the climate crisis.
The journey from Gaumukh to the Sundarbans mangrove forest was part of a two-year break from finance, an industry she had worked in for a decade, which she took to understand the grassroots-level challenges that existed in tackling climate change.
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“It was a big inflection point for me,” Gautam, now the founder of climate tech startup Opna, told Insider.
Opna, which helps corporations invest in carbon removal or reduction projects, has just secured $6.5 million from European venture capital firm Atomico.
The London-based startup, founded in 2022 as Salt, helps corporations find, fund, and monitor carbon removal projects. It ultimately wants to help bridge a funding gap for carbon projects while helping corporations reach net zero.
Net zero means removing the same amount of emissions from the atmosphere as are emitted. Carbon removal projects generate carbon credits, one of which represents one ton of Co2 removed from or prevented from entering the atmosphere. Credits can be bought and used by businesses as evidence they have compensated for emissions.
However, carbon credits have been plagued with issues around quality and whether they do in fact represent one ton of Co2 removed or avoided. This led to market hesitation and a subsequent move to fund carbon removal projects directly via forward-purchasing and long-term off-take agreements.
The funding mechanisms, popularized by Stripe’s Frontier Fund and used by Opna, are designed to address supply and demand challenges for carbon removal projects. As projects often centre around technology that is unproven at scale, they struggle to secure funding to start up or in fact prove themselves at scale.
Corporates have money to invest in net zero, and these projects need money, but a lack of in-house expertise, high transaction costs, and time-consuming processes are a barrier to funding projects for most corporations, Gautam said.
That’s what Opna hopes to solve – a corporation can use the platform to find pre-vetted carbon projects, finance them, and manage its portfolio. For a project developer, it is used to access capital and secure future demand.
This is particularly important for project developers in the global south, Gautam said. They may have difficulty accessing capital due to something as simple as the exchange rate, because of the perception of risk, or due to the fact carbon credit markets are not well established, she said.
“These project developers are often spending 6, 12, 18 months trying to raise a couple hundred thousand of dollars to get projects started,” she said.
“We need capital to be flowing without biases and obstructions into projects that are in the global south. That is really at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
Opna has a proprietary risk engine that vets projects holistically to avoid defaulting to established projects, Gautam said. Its quality assessment looks at 280 different data points, from public and proprietary sources, including the project developer’s track record, capital demands, technology risks, and its carbon sequestration potential.
“If we start penalizing without really understanding a holistic picture of risk, of projects that are first-time developers, are in a certain country, or building a certain kind of technology, we will not get there,” Gautam said of global carbon removal goals.
The fresh funds will be used to develop the risk engine further and expand headcount to 15 in the next 18 months. Long term, Opna wants to be the go-to platform for carbon project financing. To get there, it will also introduce additional services such as project-based financing and insurance.
Existing investors Pale Blue Dot, MCJ Collective, Angelinvest, and Tiny VC also participated in the round.
Check out the 11-slide redacted pitch deck below:
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