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We got hold of the 11-slide pitch deck that Abatable, a Y Combinator-backed carbon-offsetting startup, used to raise $3 million
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- Abatable raised $3 million to scale its carbon-offsetting platform.
- It was the London startup’s first raise since taking part in Y Combinator’s 2021 summer program.
- Check out the pitch deck it used to raise the funds.
Abatable, a Y Combinator-backed startup hoping to fix what it sees as the flawed carbon-offsetting market, has raised $3 million in fresh funding.
The London company connects projects that it has deemed credible and high-quality with corporations that want to offset emissions. Projects must either remove carbon from the atmosphere or reduce future emissions. They could be forestry-related, such as planting new trees or conserving existing ones, or industrial, like capturing and storing carbon.
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Its cofounders, the longtime friends Maria Eugenia Filmanovic, a former vice president of ESG and impact investing at Goldman Sachs, and Valerio Magliulo, a former product manager at Monzo, Google, and Facebook, said they came up with the idea in one of their “many, many chats.”
“Climate change, the dooming need to do something about it — it’s something that on a personal level has always been bothered me,” Magliulo told Insider. “Maria had already been dedicating her career to solving that. She really built an expertise in understanding how to evaluate and invest in forestry projects across the world as a way to help companies offset their carbon footprint.
“And that’s how we started thinking, how do we build something together to tackle this problem space?”
The pair hope to fix a carbon-offsetting market that a Guardian and Greenpeace investigation described as having “a significant credibility problem” in which some projects overstated the environmental benefits.
Abatable says it has established a standardized approach to vetting each project and its developers before onboarding them to its platform, taking previous projects, expertise, and similar existing projects into consideration to ensure that carbon credits issued to customers are credible. Magliulo acknowledged, however, that “there isn’t a globally established standard” to establish what a credible carbon credit is.
Its platform also includes scenario-planning tools for customers to see their track to net-zero across all emission-reduction initiatives, helping inform offsetting decisions.
The startup works with 50 project developers offering about 20 projects, which are packaged into portfolios to match customers’ budgets, geographical considerations, and impact goals.
Magliulo hopes the platform will become a go-to.
But offsets are scarce, as technology is still costly, and few financing options are available to project developers, Magliulo said. For example, the Swiss carbon-capture company Climeworks said in 2019 that it cost about $500 to $600 to remove a metric ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
To solve this, project developers can presell future credits. Abatable says it is working to connect project developers with potential investors who will buy credits at a discounted rate to advance money and get new projects started. Once projects are up and running, the credits can be verified and sold through the Abatable platform.
This is risky, as some projects may not come to fruition. Magliulo said the risk could be reduced through standardized processes, due diligence, and contractual mitigations.
Global Founders Capital, Blue Bear Capital, Keiki Capital, Alumni Ventures, and several angel investors participated in the seed round, the company’s first raise since taking part in Y Combinator’s program this summer.
Abatable says it will use the cash injection to build out the platform — including the advance financing of projects — expand its team of four, and onboard new project developers and customers.
Abatable’s target customers are financial institutions; the founders cited the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, in which hundreds of financial firms committed to reaching net-zero by 2050, as a driver.
Check out the redacted pitch deck it used to raise the cash:
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