I’m excited to introduce CNaught to the world. The problem we’re trying to solve is critical: get more people to put more money into reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by purchasing voluntary carbon credits. Today, too many potential buyers don’t know how or what to buy. They are afraid of doing it wrong. They are afraid of purchasing credits that underperform and leave them open to lawsuits. This isn’t their fault. The market is opaque and confusing; organizations need a substantially easier solution. Enter CNaught. With a few clicks, you can purchase effective carbon credits using portfolio strategies that were previously only available to the most sophisticated buyers.
Today, we are grateful to share that we’ve raised $2.25M in pre-seed funding led by Greycroft, with participation from Carthona Capital, Long Run Capital and several angel investors. We are doubly grateful to share that we have grown our customer base by 6x in just the last quarter. And their feedback has confirmed we’re on the right track:
“CNaught has played a crucial role in our efforts to address climate change, providing clear carbon accounting guidance and helping us confidently secure offsets. With CNaught, we’ve quickly acquired a diverse portfolio of carbon credits, allowing us to manage our carbon impact on behalf of our homeowners.” - Nikki Pechet, CEO Homebound
With the support of our investors, we will be investing in our product and services and in reaching more companies who care about climate change but aren’t sure how to get involved.
Carbon credits are simple in concept: they are a mechanism to fund projects that reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Those projects are critical to mitigating climate change and they would not happen absent the funding that comes from those purchasing credits.
Since 2004, businesses and individuals around the world have purchased more than 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon credits, spending an estimated $2B in 2021 alone.
McKinsey forecasts the market will grow to $50B annually by 2030, with businesses at the forefront. In 2023, consumers, investors, and employees increasingly demand that companies play an active role in carbon reduction. Governments are demanding it, too, with the EU recently implementing its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the state of California passing bills to require companies operating in the state to disclose their emissions. Furthermore, agencies around the world like the SEC and the Financial Stability Board have proposed requiring companies to disclose their climate risks and mitigation plans.
But the market for carbon credits cannot deliver the needed impact at scale without radical improvement. Since its inception, the market has been opaque and confusing. To this day, buying credits too often feels like purchasing stocks in the 1970s: buyers have to do their own research, contact a broker who executes the trade, and hope they didn’t waste their money on a worthless piece of paper. Buyers struggle to sort through the variety of projects available and assess quality in a comprehensive manner. Many businesses end up publicly promising to meet emissions targets only to fall short, inviting media and regulatory scrutiny, consumer lawsuits, and shareholder insurrection, as seen with Delta, Nestle, and Danone.
As a result, buyers who are trying to make a difference may not actually be reducing emissions or removing carbon at all. Companies try to take positive climate action, but often receive negative headlines and regulatory scrutiny instead. Even worse, potential buyers see the challenges, stay on the sidelines, and do not engage with one of the most powerful tools we have to fight climate change today. Indeed, even among Forbes Global 2000 companies with net zero goals, fewer than one third of them are open to using carbon credits without conditions on the quality and integrity of projects.
Our founding team has decades of experience building products in Silicon Valley at companies like Rev, Thumbtack, and Uber. We know the product that provides the easiest way to meet a customer’s needs is almost always the right product. We also know that the best way to solve a user’s problem is to start by talking to them. So we did. And when we asked buyers and potential buyers what they would need to get off the sidelines or increase their participation in the carbon market, there was remarkable consistency:
We didn’t see this in the world, so we built CNaught. CNaught is a carbon credit platform that gives customers confidence that they are buying real impact, not just glossy photos. We are the first solution for buying carbon credits that uses the latest technology and research to maximize climate impact and mitigate risk.
The most sophisticated buyers with millions to spend and large sustainability teams already approach carbon credits with this scientific rigor. CNaught is bringing the same precision to everyone else, democratizing carbon credis for buyers of all sizes, whether they measure their purchases in kilograms or thousands of tonnes. If the prior solutions are stock brokers, CNaught is the robo advisor for carbon credits.
To simplify the process and bring confidence to carbon credit buyers, CNaught does three things:
Finally, we make it simple for our users to buy and then explain their approach to the world. Every user receives tools to automatically share their impact with their stakeholders. And everything is available at a flat rate per tonne of credit purchased, with no additional fees. It’s an “easy button” for carbon credits unlike anything else in the market.
Best of all, it’s working. In just the last six months, we have partnered with dozens of new customers. Some, like PURE Insurance, DuckDuckGo, Canopy and Zeelo, had purchased credits before and were looking for a better way. Others, like Homebound, Thrive Home Builders, and Hitch, were excited to find an easy-to-use way to drive real climate impact. We are grateful to have earned the trust of these customers and proud to help them on their sustainability journeys.
If you’ve been looking for a straightforward way to take climate action with real impact, sign up and get started for free or contact us at sales@cnaught.com.
