Year: 2020

As a founding member of TI Platform Management, I have quarterbacked more than $200 million in investments into first-time fund managers around the world. That portfolio includes being one of the first institutional checks into Atomic Labs ($170+ million, SaaStr ($160+ million) and Entrepreneur First ($140+ million), among many others.

Having seen successful returns as a fund manager and an early-stage VC (as well as recently raising my own angel fund), I’ve formulated several best practices and strategies for investing in fund managers. If you want to raise your first fund, here’s how.

Understand the mentality of an LP

Just as VCs bucket startup founders into categories, limited partners (the investors in your venture fund, also known as “LPs”) have an unwritten way of categorizing venture managers. The vast majority fit one of three archetypes:

• Former founder/operator turned VC
• Spin-off manager from a mega fund
• Angel investor with a strong track record

Here’s how each is perceived by institutional LPs and the unique blockers they have to overcome:

Former founder/operator turned VC

Having been through the journey of starting a company, former founders/operators often have strong intuition in identifying founders and an empathy/rapport that raises their win-rate on deals. Additionally, having built an innovative company, they can bring special insights in where the market is headed. Building a company, however, requires different skills from founding a fund.

If you’re a former founder/operator turned VC, expect LPs to ask questions that suss out:

So you’re looking for a storage unit to put some stuff in for a few months. Maybe you’re moving and your new place isn’t ready yet – or maybe you’re just looking to declutter and want to tuck some stuff away for a while and see if you’re really ready to part with it.

As you may find, the process of finding a storage unit can be… not great. While there are a few big storage chains in the market, a huge chunk of the self storage industry is made up of independent/mom-and-pop shops that don’t necessarily have the time/budget to keep up as tech has evolved. It can involve a lot of poking around out-of-date websites, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of paperwork.

OpenUnit, a startup out of Toronto, wants to fix that. They’re aiming to be Shopify for the self-storage industry, with an all-in-one solution that provides a modern interface to help customers make reservations on the frontend, and gives facility managers everything they need to keep things running on the backend.

Their management tool provides things like:

• A white labeled site for making reservations
• Unit inventory management
• Expense tracking
• Group chats/DMs to give employees and managers a place to keep in touch
• Pricing/revenue analytics
• Digital lease signing
• A CRM for managing leads and existing relationships

The company isn’t charging facility managers a monthly fee; instead, they’re handling credit card payment processing and taking a cut of 2.9% (+ 30 cents) per transaction.

Co-founders Taylor Cooney and Lucas Playford found their way into self-storage when Taylor’s landlords came to him with an offer: they wanted to sell the place he was renting, and they’d give him a stack of cash if he could be out within just a few days. Pulling that off meant finding a place to keep all of his stuff while he looked for a new home, which is when he realized how antiquated the self-storage process could be.

The two initially set their sites on something a bit different: a Hotwire-style search system that would find deals on local storage units, negotiating the monthly cost on a customer’s behalf for a small one-time fee. The more they worked with facility managers, the more gaps they found in the tools and systems on the market, so they shifted focus to this facility management suite.

OpenUnit was part of the Winter 2020 Y Combinator class which ended back in March, but the team opted to defer their demo day debut until YC’s Summer 2020 event next week. As March came to an end and the severity of the pandemic was becoming more clear, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called upon any citizens abroad to return home sooner than later. Launching a company while rushing to get back home is hardly ideal, so the two chose to hold off their launch until now.

After a few weeks of private testing, OpenUnit is now starting to bring more storage facilities on board. Run a storage company and want to give it a look? They’ve got a waiting list here.

It has been nearly a decade since Anu Duggal, founding partner of Female Founders Fund, started raising money to invest in women-led startups. In 2020, the investor says her thesis — that there will be a generation of successful venture-backed businesses built by women — is one you can’t avoid.

“You can’t argue with that anymore,” she said. “There are going to be some people who take a little longer to kind of accept that this is a long-term development, and there’s some that have recognized this is the future.”

We brought Duggal on to Extra Crunch Live on Thursday to discuss how her work is changing amid unprecedented times.

She, like many investors, says she has taken on the “new normal as the new normal” and is invested in startups without ever meeting founders in-person. But how does the breakdown of traditional networks impact female founders?

“I wouldn’t say we’re seeing new tailwinds yet,” she said, on the focus to invest in female founders. “I think we’re still kind of in the early innings of corona. I will say, though, that there’s reason to be optimistic.”

Duggal talks about bright spots in this dumpster fire of a year, scout programs and the “lipstick effect” in the full session, which is available below. You can sign up for Extra Crunch here if you still need access.

Should investors publicly share portfolio diversity data?

We felt strongly about disclosing diversity data because, you know, we invest 100% in companies started by women and so we’re already at somewhat of an advantage compared to most of the industry. I think the reason we did it was to show that we’re not patting ourselves on the back. We still have more work to do. And here’s what we’re going to do, here are the action steps we’re taking.

Once upon a time, Box’s Aaron Levie was just a guy with an idea for a company: 15 years ago as a USC student, he conceived of a way to simply store and share files online.

It may be hard to recall, but back then, the world was awash with thumb drives and moving files manually, but Levie saw an opportunity to change that.

Today, his company helps enterprise customers collaborate and manage content in the cloud, but when Levie appeared on an episode of Extra Crunch Live at the end of May, my colleague Jon Shieber and I asked him if he had any advice for startups. While he was careful to point out that there is no “one size fits all” advice, he did make one thing clear:

“I would highly recommend to any company of any size that you have as much control of your destiny as possible. So put yourself in a position where you spend as little amount of dollars as you can from a burn standpoint and get as close to revenue being equal to your expenses as you can possibly get to,” he advised.

Don’t let current conditions scare you

Levie also advised founders not to be frightened off by current conditions, whether that’s the pandemic or the recession. Instead, he said if you have an idea, seize the moment and build it, regardless of the economy or the state of the world. If, like Levie, you are in it for the long haul, this too will pass, and if your idea is good enough, it will survive and even thrive as you move through your startup growth cycle.

This morning, we published exclusive, leaked details about Palantir’s much anticipated S-1 filing, including the company’s revenues, margins, operating loss, and government/commercial contract breakdown.

One aspect that we didn’t cover much though was the actual process the company intends to use to float its shares on the stock exchange. Rumors have flown for weeks that the company intends to pursue a direct listing, probably targeting mid-to-late September.

Direct listings are different from the standard IPO process in that there are no new shares offered to the public, the company doesn’t raise money, and typically, employees and insiders have no lockup period. The lockup period in a typical IPO is around six months, although it can be a year or longer in special cases. Given there are no new shares and no lockups, trades after a direct listing are literally any shares offered by insiders for sale.

That can lead to volatility, and that volatility is one reason why some companies have been hesitant to go the direct listing route — without lockups, employees and venture capitalists could theoretically quickly dump their shares, tanking the stock straight out of the gate and harming the perception of its long-term value.

For strong companies though, the open free-for-all makes sense. For instance, when Spotify executed its direct listing in early 2018, the company had no lockup period for its insiders except for one large shareholder Tencent. Slack, which pursued a direct listing in mid-2019, similarly had effectively no lockup. Both companies have performed admirably since their public debuts.

However, according to multiple sources who have seen its prospectus documents, Palantir intends to have a lockup period on its shares. One source did confirm that the company will pursue a direct listing, although we have not been able to verify that with multiple sources.

The combination of a direct listing and a lockup period would be novel, and represents a turn away from the more employee-friendly tactics that have been pioneered by Slack and Spotify.

The lockup will almost certainly help stabilize Palantir’s stock post-debut, which will be less volatile since insiders won’t be able to trade their shares. However, it is definitely not a vote of confidence that a 17-year-old company thinks it needs to control the selling decisions of its workforce and investors in order to maintain its share price on the public markets.

As before, the company’s S-1 is clearly in the offing, and we will have more details on the specifics when the official docs are filed with the SEC.

In discussions of ethically dubious social networks Facebook is the usual reference choice. But spare a thought for subscribers of InterNations, a Munich-based social networking community for expats, who have found themselves unable to obtain refunds for full-year payments charged in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.

InterNations has operated an expat networking experience since 2007, offering a free ‘Basic’ tier of membership that gives users some access to site content and community-organized events (if they pay an entry fee); or a premium tier which requires shelling out for a year’s subscription up front to get free/reduced price entry to networking events, plus access to some additional site features.

The German company appears to be a fan of nominative determinism — having named the subscription tier of membership ‘Albatross‘, given how difficult it is for users to exit once they upgrade from Basic to paying, perpetually renewing contract.

Several former members told us their memberships were auto-renewed for a full year without any warning in the middle of the pandemic. When they contacted InterNations to request a refund they were point-blank refused — with the company saying they were bound by the terms of the contract they’d entered into when they paid to upgrade the year before.

In emails we’ve reviewed between users and InterNations’ staff the company repeatedly ignores requests for refunds.

One UK-based user, who told us she had signed up to use the service to attend networking events in London and Paris, where she travelled regularly for work, found herself put on furlough in March when the UK went into lockdown. She only noticed the InterNations subscription had autorenewed when she saw a charge as she was checking her bank statement.

She contacted InterNations to request a refund — pointing out there were now no physical events near her, nor would she be able to attend in-person networking events for the foreseeable future due to shielding as a result of personal vulnerability to the health risk posed by COVID-19. But InterNations still refused to refund her subscription.

Instead it offered to put the year’s ‘Albatross’ membership on hold until 2022 — suggesting she might be able to make use of the services she’d just been billed for in two years’ time.

“Many of the people complaining feel aggrieved by InterNation because the entire event offering is very much voluntary and community based. It relies on people stepping forward to organise groups of people to attend events, walks, screening etc. Most of them do not make financial gain out of it,” she told us.

“So for this organisation not to be looking after its very own community feels like a slap on our faces.”

“My local gym froze my membership from April 2020 without any of its members having to request it. They informed us by email, they would do this. I was able to cancel in July without any question asked,” she added. “If my small gym is able to do this, how come InterNations is not stopping the auto-renewal of the membership at such a time?

“When everyone almost worldwide is worrying about their health, their livelihood, their relatives, we are not remembering to cancel or to stop memberships.”

Another user, who signed up to the service after moving from the US to Singapore, told us he was sent repeated payment demands in the middle of the coronavirus crisis after his on-file credit card had expired — which meant InterNations couldn’t auto collect his payment.

He told it he wanted to cancel the subscription but it told him he would only able to delete his account if he paid up for a full second year. Eventually he said he felt he had no choice but to pay the demand for around $100 in order that he could downgrade from ‘Albatross’ to ‘Basic’ and have his account deleted.

“I was (and still am) a paid subscriber and during the height of the pandemic I never received an offer of ‘free months’ of membership,” he said. “Instead, all I got was a deluge of threatening emails about how they couldn’t process my credit card information. Nothing even remotely about whether I was sick or even still alive. They just wanted my credit card details.”

A third user, who signed up for the service after moving to Hanoi, summed up her experience as “not the best”. She pointed us to a blog post in which she recounts a similar story — finding herself charged for a renewal in the middle of the coronavirus without any advance warning and having forgotten to cancel the subscription herself.

“I didn’t realise I’d been charged until a notification from PayPal arrived in my inbox,” she writes. “Say, what? Where was the email reminder? Where was the ‘now due’ invoice that is the hallmark of good business? Turns out InterNations don’t send them.”

This user was finally able to obtain a refund — but only via disputing the charge through PayPal. She got no joy asking for her money back from InterNations itself.

A deluge of similar complaints about the company can be seen on Trustpilot — where InterNations has an 81% ‘bad’ rating at the time of writing.

“An annual membership was taken from my account, and refund was refused. A year on and I am being threatened with non payment of a new invoice,” writes one reviewer.

“I cancelled my membership the past two years and every year it shows that I didn’t and their records conveniently show no record of my cancellation. Then they will refuse refunds,” recounts another.

“InterNations contacted me via automated email about my membership payment being due. When I responded, asking to cancel membership since I haven’t logged in in months and can’t afford membership during these times, they refused to help,” says another irate reviewer. “They make it impossible to do this simple task. They’re greedily unable to help with anything other than take your money. No empathy. All they have to do is cancel the membership.”

“They don’t even send a reminder for end of membership. Some people have seen their credit card debited, without any reminder. And if your credit card you registered has expired, they keep harassing you and threaten you,” runs another despairing former user.

In emails to users who are requesting a refund which we’ve seen InterNations simply points them to German law — which does appear to be the legal sticking point here. As a number of expat blogs warn, service contracts in Germany can be a lot harder to get out of than into.

Though, of course, it’s unlikely to have been immediately clear to people signing up to a global social network in cities like Hanoi and Singapore that they needed to understand German contract law before hitting ‘subscribe’.

BEUC, the European consumer rights group, told us there’s no pan-EU requirement for a notification to be actively sent to users ahead of an auto-renewal of a services contract — and the lack of such a notification ahead of the InterNations subscription renewal is one of the key recurring complaints.

“EU law only requires the consumer to be informed of the final price and the contractual conditions,” a spokesperson said, noting that consumer rights can vary substantially from member state to member state as the area isn’t harmonised at EU level.

So, while BEUC noted that, for example, Belgium law does have a specific provision which allows the consumer to terminate a contract at no cost after its tacit renewal — Germany, self evidently, does not. Although domestic pressure appears to be growing for reform of its one-sided contract rules.

When we put the various complaints we’d heard about refunds and cancelations (and indeed dark patterns) to InterNations, its founder and co-CEO, Malte Zeeck, said the company does not breach consumer law — and further claimed it “clearly communicates” subscription renewals to users.

“InterNations is operating on a standard subscription model like many other businesses, which is at no point in breach of consumer protection laws,” he said. “Subscriptions are renewed automatically, which is clearly communicated at the beginning of each subscription period, in each invoice, and in every user’s membership and account settings. This is also where a subscription can be cancelled at any time, without a notice period that has to be observed.

“Our members have a continual visual reminder of their membership status through the Albatross symbol found on their profile picture. They can also always see their current membership status by visiting their membership page.”

And while he conceded that InterNations had had to cancel in-person events “during the height of the pandemic” he said it substituted this reduction in service by offering “additional free months of membership” and “working very hard to respond to the situation and find ways for our members to still meet and spend time together online”.

“After only a few weeks, we already offered over 500 online activities worldwide to help expats and global minds connect and share experiences — more online events were being added every day,” he added. “In addition, our users continued to benefit from other online networking and information features our premium membership offers. Since restrictions on in-person events are being lifted around the world, we have started to offer many opportunities for our members again to meet in person.”

EU consumer protection rules do bake in requirements that contract terms be fair — with provisions intended to protect against things like one-sided changes to a service without a valid reason. But it’s pretty clear that InterNations could argue a pandemic is a valid reason for canceling in person events and replacing them with online networking. So angry users are unlikely to find much solace there.

Still, maintaining such an inflexible and user hostile attitude during a pandemic does look risky for InterNations and its reputation, given new users are likely to be far less easy for it to net now the coronavirus has settled like a dead calm on so much foreign travel.

So while it might be legally entitled to sit and claw in revenue from people who — living through a pandemic and worried about things like their jobs, health and loved ones — forgot to cancel a subscription that only comes round once a year, it’s hardly a recipe for long-term customer loyalty.

Indeed, we’ve seen these kind of auto-renewing subscription gigs crop up in the ecommerce space in years past. And none of those dubious tactics went the distance.

Tricking consumers into recurring payments is never a good long term business strategy and it certainly isn’t now that reputational damage can scale all over social media in seconds. (To wit: Irate InterNations users have been organizing via Twitter and have set up a website to amplify negative reviews where they urge people to boycott the service.)

None of the people who’ve been stung by InterNations’ auto-renewing subscription are likely to forget to cancel a second time so won’t be a source of recurring revenue in future. And treating users like so much chum when the company also relies upon their community spirit to power its service looks like a rotten business model long past its sell-by-date. (However many members InterNations claims have contacted it “to say how much our online events have helped them to stay in touch with people and also stay positive during a period of self-isolation”, a minority of satisfied customers are being drowned out by all the angry online views.)

In the meanwhile, it’s certainly curious to encounter a niche social network that’s happy operating with as little regard for users’ wishes as some of the far more maligned giants of the category. To the point where its website displays information regarding the European Commission’s “online dispute resolution” platform in small print right on the contacts page. Er, perhaps Facebook should take note.

On unhappy users, Zeeck only had this to say: “We are sorry that some of our former members perceive this differently and were not happy with the benefits our membership offered them. We are always taking our users’ feedback seriously and are working hard to provide a great experience for them. At the same time, we are aware that it is hard to have the perfect solution for everybody, and there will always be detractors.”

But perhaps he’s been taking cues from Mark Zuckerberg’s neverending apology tours.

Avi Freedman is like any other founder: He wants to build a great company. In this case network analytics platform Kentik, and he needs venture capital to do it. Like pretty much all founders, he doesn’t like the dilution that comes from taking vast sums from VCs in order to grow. There’s always been an alluring solution to this dilemma, but one that comes with its own tradeoffs.

Debt.

The word has negative connotations, but the reality is that just like equity capital, debt is a key tool in the corporate finance toolbox. Judicious use of debt with the right terms and conditions can cut the cost of capital for a startup significantly, saving founders and early-stage investors from serious dilution as a company scales. Used too heavily or improperly however, and debt can turn a bad financial quarter into a dead company, stat.

Founders, particularly those who run companies with recurring revenues, are increasingly hearing the debt pitch from bankers and peers, leading many to consider debt options much earlier than has traditionally been the norm. Boards are also getting more comfortable with the idea of a startup taking on early debt to extend runways and double down on growth.

Let’s walk through how a founder sees debt today and discuss what the market looks like for debt options. Freedman was helpful in illuminating his recent fundraise, including the range of term sheets he got, and was willing to share his experience and thinking on how he approached his latest financing.

Debt and COVID-19

Some context to get started. Kentik is a six-year-old SaaS platform that has raised more than $60 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase, including a seed round led by First Round Capital and a Series A led by the now-defunct August Capital (plus the company’s most recent equity/debt round we’re talking about today). Freedman himself has been a long-time entrepreneur, building the first ISP in Philadelphia back in 1992. Kentik was his first true “venture-backed” business in the Silicon Valley startup model.

Disrupt 2020 is a few weeks away and we’re looking for founders to submit their pitch decks. In the Pitch Deck Teardown, top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will evaluate and suggest fixes for Disrupt 2020 attendees’ pitch decks.

First impressions are everything, and pitch decks are often the first glimpse of companies by investors and business partners. It’s critical that these decks accurately present and illustrate the company’s goals and potential concisely and effectively.

We’ve enlisted the help of some of the best venture capitalists. During these sessions, VCs will step through each slide, talking about what works, what doesn’t work and what needs to be changed to make the most impact. Along the way, expect to hear valuable insight on how investors evaluate pitch decks and the red flags that can shut down a potential investment.

What’s more, we’re looking for pitch decks to feature in these sessions. We want to showcase real pitch decks from actual companies. Anyone can submit their deck, though we’re looking for decks from early-stage companies. Submit your pitch deck here.

Some guidelines:

• When submitting, please use the email you used when you registered for Disrupt 2020
• Only pitch decks of registered Disrupt attendees will be selected
• Early-stage companies are more likely to be selected for this session
• If selected, you’ll be notified and told in which session your deck will be featured

Here are the investors signed up for the Pitch Deck Teardown:

• Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures)
• Charles Hudson (Venture Forward)
• Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst)
• Megan Quinn (Spark Capital)
• Cyan Banister (Long Journey Ventures)
• Roelof Botha (Sequoia)
• Susan Lyne (BBG)

Pitch Deck Teardown is part of a much larger event focused on all aspects of building technology companies. For the first time, TechCrunch’s big yearly event, Disrupt, is going fully virtual in 2020, allowing more people to attend and interact with speakers, investors and founders. And Disrupt will stretch over five days — September 14-18 — in order to make it easier for everyone to take in all the amazing programming. Prices increase soon, so get your pass now and then submit your pitch deck for invaluable feedback from our panel of VCs.

Palantir filed an S-1 confidentially to the SEC in early July, but we have so far been waiting for the final doc to be published for weeks now with nary a murmur. Now, thanks to some leaked screenshots to TechCrunch from a Palantir shareholder, we might have some top-line numbers.

In screenshots of a draft S-1 statement dated yesterday (August 20), Palantir is listed as generating revenues of roughly $742 million in 2019 (Palantir’s fiscal year is a calendar year). That revenue was up from $595 million in 2018, a gain of roughly 25%. That’s growth, although not particularly great given some of the massive SaaS growth we have seen in recent IPOs like Datadog.

The company’s revenue is a disappointment, after the company was reported to have been on the cusp of $1 billion in revenue for years. Private companies, of course, do not normally disclose their financial results, but the company’s size falls far short of expectations, leaks, and other reports.

The real shocker though in these numbers is when you head to the bottom of the company’s revenue statement. In the screenshots of the company’s financials, Palantir lists a net loss of roughly $580 million for 2019, which is almost identical to its loss in 2018. The company listed a net loss percentage of 97% for 2018, improving to a loss of 78% for last year.

The company’s $580 million loss during the period shows at once why the company has needed to raise billions to-date, and how far it has yet to go until it can self-sustain.

Gross profit for 2019 was roughly $500 million in 2019, slightly higher than in 2018. The company’s big expense is around sales and marketing, which was roughly $450 million for both years and represented 61% of revenue in 2019.

More interesting has to do with the company’s revenue breakdown. Palantir is widely known for its government contracting, but in recent years, the company has tried to expand its data products into the private sector.

According to the leaked screenshots shown to TechCrunch, Palantir disclosed its revenue breakdown for the first six months of 2019 and the first six months of 2020. For the first half of this year, Palantir generated $258 million in government-derived revenue (53.5%), compared to $224 million in commercial revenue (46.5%). In 2019, government revenue was $146 million (45%) and commercial revenue was $177 million (55%).

That’s actually quite out-of-sync with some of the public comments the company has made about reducing reliance on government contracts for its revenues. The company’s government revenues are higher today both in absolute totals and relatively speaking, begging the question whether its products are competitive in the enterprise space outside of its traditional bastion in government services.

While there is no firm date for the Palantir S-1 that we know of, given the financials are apparently floating around out there, expect it to come sooner rather than later.

We have reached out to a Palantir PR contact for comment, who declined to comment.

It was the Australian bush fire that finally did it.

For twelve years Adam Hearne had worked at companies which represented some of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. First at Rio Tinto, one of the largest industrial miners, and then at Amazon, where he handled inbound delivery operations across the EU, Hearne was involved in ensuring that things flowed smoothly for companies whose operations spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the environment.

Amazon’s business alone was responsible for emitting 51.17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year — the equivalent of 13 coal burning power plants, according to a report from the company.

Then, Hearne’s home country burned.

In 2019 wildfires erupted that engulfed over 46 million acres of land, destroyed over 9,000 buildings, and killed over 400 people and untold numbers of animals — driving some species to the brink of extinction.

Hearne, along with an old friend from his business school rugby days, Roheet Shah; and computer science and machine learning experts from Imperial College of London, Yuri Oparin and Jeremiah Smith; launched CarbonChain that year. The company, now poised to graduate from the latest Y Combinator cohort, is pitching a service that can accurately account for emissions from the commodities industry — which is responsible for 50 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The company’s services are coming at the right time. Countries around the globe are poised to adopt much more stringent regulations around carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union is slowly working towards passage of sweeping new regulations on climate change that are mirrored in the region’s local economies. Even petrostates like Russia are poised to enact new climate regulations (at least according to Russian officials).

What’s missing in all of this are ways for companies to accurately track their emissions and technologies that can adequately monitor how well emissions offsets are working.

CarbonChain tackles this problem by going to the sectors that are responsible for the largest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, Hearne said.

“The world needs hard accounting and hard numbers of what commodities companies are producing,” said Hearne in a July interview.

To ensure that emissions reductions and regulations are working, regulators need to go after oil and gas and commodities and minerals producers, according to Hearne. “Those sectors are uniform and carbon intensive and that’s how you quantify them,” he said.

CarbonChain has built models for every single asset in the supply chain for these industries, according to Hearne. The company has created digital twins of every piece of equipment used in heavy industry. If CarbonChain can’t get the information about the equipment from the companies that use it, they go to the engineering firms that built the equipment or facility for the company.

“In order to get a number that doesn’t get laughed out of the room we have to go down to the aluminum smelter that has a power station right next to it,” said Hearne. “Ninety percent of its footprint is its electrical usage.”

According to Hearne, CarbonChain’s system is so precise that it can tell users how much carbon emissions are embedded in a cup of coffee or a glass of wine (which is two pounds of carbon dioxide for imported wine, by the way).

CarbonChain is already selling its services to commodities producers and carbon traders who are operating in existing carbon trading schemes.

So far, the company has received roughly $500,000 from the UK government and an investment from one of its (undisclosed) commodities customers.

But CarbonChain’s technology seems to have the most rigorous methodology of any of the companies that’s purporting to do emissions monitoring. Other startups purporting to provide carbon emissions data for companies include Persefoni, which raised $3.5 million for its solution, and another Y Combinator graduate SINAI Technologies.

If the company can actually measure the embedded emissions of materials down to a single piece of rebar, it could have huge consequences for industry broadly.

The company is also slots nicely into the trend of entrepreneurs with deep industry experience building vertical solutions based on the collection of massive data sets using machine learning.