Carbon-measurement and removal API Pledge raises $4.5m seed round from Visionaries Club, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Breyer Capital and Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth

Founded by former Revolut and Freetrade executives, Pledge empowers companies to quickly and easily deploy the software infrastructure and tools to make their products and services carbon neutral with high-quality offsets and CO2 removals.

London, UK , October 22nd, 2021 – Pledge, the platform building the tools and software infrastructure to help scale greenhouse gas emissions measurement, reduction and removal, has today announced a $4.5m seed round. The business was founded by early Revolut employees David de Picciotto and Thomas Lucas, as well as Freetrade’s co-founder and former CTO André Mohamed. The round was led by Visionaries Club with participation from Lowercarbon Capital, Breyer Capital and Zinal Growth, the investment vehicle of Guillaume Pousaz (founder & CEO of Checkout.com). The funding will support Pledge in the roll-out of their product. Starting with the $9.6 trillion global logistics and transportation market, Pledge has been operating in closed beta until now, with customers active across freight, e-commerce, travel, last-mile and ride-hailing.

“Currently, no easy and scalable way exists for companies of any size to understand and remove their emissions. Traditional carbon measurement and offsetting solutions are costly and difficult to implement and so only accessible to a restricted group of larger companies. We started Pledge to enable any company to launch high quality and verified climate products in the easiest and fastest way possible. Our mission is to raise climate awareness and empower businesses to accelerate their net zero transition, becoming a positive contributor to the current crisis.” said David de Picciotto, co-founder and CEO of Pledge. 

By focusing on specific use cases, starting with logistics and transportation, Pledge is taking a bottom-up and data-driven approach, helping companies measure and mitigate their shipments, rides, deliveries or travels to reach carbon neutrality by integrating the Pledge API. The platform aims to provide customers with detailed analytics and insights as well as recommendations on how to reduce their emissions over time. Pledge’s emissions calculations follow globally recognized and trusted standards, including the GHG protocol, the GLEC framework as well as the ICAO methodology while complying with ISO standards.

Similarly, the carbon removals market is opaque with credits bearing a high cost per ton and minimum volume purchase. Pledge is building a marketplace of verified offsetting and removal solutions that allows companies to purchase a fraction of a carbon credit (similar to retail investors purchasing a fraction of a stock) while offering access to balanced portfolios encompassing different methodologies and geographies (similar to an ETF).

Pledge’s co-founder André Mohamed previously built Freetrade, a zero commission stock broker in the UK. He then went on to launch Europe’s first fractional and commission-free stock trading platform at Revolut.

“Pledge will apply a similar approach to carbon credits as we did to stocks at Freetrade and Revolut, fractionalising them and allowing businesses to only buy what they need as well as to offer portfolios in a similar fashion to how ETFs are constructed. That way, anyone can have access to the same quality of carbon credits as large, multinational companies but without the friction” said Mohamed.

Climate change cannot be ignored and all companies must adapt.

“Pledge is building pipes for any business to launch applications to measure and mitigate their environmental impact. Similar to the flurry of financial infrastructure providers allowing any company to become a fintech, Pledge will become the enabler of climate initiatives by providing the relevant tools and software infrastructure to build on top of.” said Robert Lacher, Co-founder and Partner of Visionaries Club.”

Clay Dumas, Partner at Lowercarbon Capital added,

“The biggest bottleneck to scaling carbon removal will be connecting supply with demand. The team at Pledge is applying what they learned building the world’s top financial products to unlock euros, dollars, and pounds to suck carbon out of the sky.”

About Pledge:

Pledge makes it simple for businesses to understand and manage the climate impact of their products. By providing tools and infrastructure, Pledge automates the delivery of climate solutions – such as footprint measurement, reduction and offsetting – into customer journeys. Pledge was founded in 2021 by early employees of Revolut and the co-founder of Freetrade.

About Visionaries Club: 

Visionaries Club is a $170M Berlin-based early stage VC fund focused on B2B. It unites the strongest network of successful digital entrepreneurs such as the founders of Flixbus, Skype, Spotify and UiPath and family businesses like Swarovski, Mittal and Oetker, in a venture capital fund to invest in the next generation of founders. The $85M Visionaries Club Seed Fund and $85M Visionaries Club Growth Fund leverage its founder LP network for very early and exclusive access to the most promising entrepreneurs across Europe and subsequently add significant unique, non-replicable value by giving its portfolio companies access to the experience and network of the fund’s unicorn founders as well as to the market insights, contacts and sales opportunities stemming from its industrial LP network. 

About Lowercarbon Capital:

Lowercarbon Capital is an $800M early-stage venture capital fund led by Chris and Crystal Sacca to fund research and invest in technologies to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. To that end, Lowercarbon invests in planet-healing technologies to (1) reduce greenhouse emissions, (2) remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and relieve the worst impacts of climate change in case (1) and (2) take longer than we hope.