Author: azeeadmin

This morning Cube, a startup that builds FP&A software for the mid-market, announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A. The company previously raised a $5 million seed round that TechCrunch covered last August. Mayfield led its Series A, which saw participation from Operator Collective and Bonfire Ventures.

FP&A is probably not an acronym that you come across often. It spells out to financial planning and analysis, or the process by which companies outline their financial future. It’s pretty damn important. But like lots of the tech that CFOs and other financial types use, software in the FP&A space is often a mix of antiquated, expensive and slow.

Just ask the CFO you know best. Cube wants to build software for FP&A work that at once isn’t awful, and doesn’t require companies to stop using spreadsheets. The company’s software absorbs information from a company’s general ledger (accounting software), CRM (Zoho CRM, perhaps) and payroll service into one location. From there, CFOs and their team can view the past and sketch their financial future using a few different viewing methods, including the venerable spreadsheet.

When TechCrunch last checked in on Cube, we said that we’d report back when the company had growth numbers to share. Happily the startup’s CEO Christina Ross was willing to share. Per the founder, Cube customers have scaled 4x since its seed round, and revenue growth is tracking ahead of customer growth. Even better, Cube’s contract mix has shifted, with the company now securing more than half of its deals with multi-year terms.

When we spoke to Ross, her newest investor, Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra, was also on the call. He added that Cube has seen deal win rates in the 60% to 70% range, implying that it has found product-market fit. As Cube’s software starts at $850 per month for its service, any deal win is material annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the early-stage startup. Batra also stressed that Cube is seeing strong engagement inside of its product.

What is Cube going to do with its new capital? Ross said that she’s a trained CFO and knows the worries of raising too much money. She knows where the money is going, she added. One place the company intends to spend is headcount. The startup plans to triple its personnel base by the end of 2021, hiring for both product and go-to-market (GTM) roles. Ross also noted her company had built out its sales function after its seed round, and intends to grow its marketing efforts now that it has secured new capital.

Cube fits neatly into a trend that we’re seeing in recent months of companies not merely raising successive funding rounds more rapidly than the old-fashioned 18-month cadence. It’s somewhat common lately to see some startups raising new rounds just a few quarters after their last capital event. M1 Finance also announced a new round this morning, for example; it raised twice in 2020.

Let’s see what Cube can do with its Series A. If it can keep its recent pace of growth up, perhaps it will raise again this year.

The Swiss-based, venture capital-backed, direct air capture technology developer Climeworks is partnering with a joint venture between the government of Norway and massive European energy companies to map the pathway for a business that could provide not only the direct capture of carbon dioxide emissions from air, but the  underground sequestration and storage of those emissions.

The deal could pave the way for a new business that would offer carbon capture and sequestration services to commercial enterprises around the world, if the joint venture between the Climeworks and the newly formed Northern Lights company is successful. It would mean the realization of a full-chain carbon dioxide removal service that the two companies called a necessary component of the efforts to reverse global climate change.

Northern Lights was incorporated in March as a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and Total to provide processing, transportation and underground sequestration services for captured carbon dioxide emissions. The business is one of the lynchpins in the Norwegian government’s efforts to capture and store carbon emissions safely underground under a plan called The Longship Project.

“There is growing awareness of the need to build capacity to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere to achieve net zero by 2050. We are enthusiastic about this collaboration with Climeworks. Combined with safe and permanent storage, direct air capture has the potential to get the carbon cycle back in balance,” said Børre Jacobsen, the  Managing Director of Northern Lights, in a statement.

The two companies are hoping to prove that Northern Lights facilities combined with Climeworks direct air capture technologies can prove to be a part of a push towards negative emissions technologies that allow companies in non-industrial sectors to become either carbon neutral or carbon negative.

There are a number of caveats to the project, which reveal both the potential promise and pitfalls of direct air capture initiatives and sequestration and monitoring projects.

The first issue is the need to set a global price for carbon dioxide emissions that would take to make the projects economically viable.

“There is one legislation worldwide that is paying for direct air capture of CO2 and that is the Low Carbon Fuel Standard in California,” said Christoph Gelbad, the co-chief executive and co-founder of Climeworks. “It’s paying up to $200 per ton… this price range is the price range that will be needed to make this full chain, really going from the atmosphere to direct air capture to underground storage and monitoring. That will be the price range needed to build up the infrastructure and finance it.”

A breakdown of the costs associated with different carbon capture technologies.Image Credit: Climeworks

That price is on the highest end of any that world leaders have discusses as a potential cost for carbon emitting industries (and it’s well below the price that China has set for carbon emissions, which is important to note given the scale of China’s contribution to the production of greenhouse gases that cause global warming).

Beyond any pricing concerns associated with making these direct air carbon capture and storage solutions viable, there’s the scale at which these projects would need to be developed to make a real dent in global emissions.

Here again, Gelbad offers a clear-eyed assessment of his company’s capabilities and the size of the problem.

“The numbers given by science 10 to 20 billion tons of CO2 for removal,” Gelbad said. “Direct Air Capture will need to grow at a gigaton scale. This [potential] site will be in the megaton scale. [But] this is the range where our journey together with Northern Lights definitely could go. We see it going into the megaton ranges.”

Climeworks uses renewable energy and waste heat to power modular collectors that can be stacked into machines at any size. The only limit to the company’s ability to capture carbon dioxide is the availability of power, according to Gelbad.

The company already has a collaboration with an Icelandic company called Carbfix, where the Climeworks technology is used to capture carbon dioxide and store it in mineralized basalt. The company said in a statement that it’s looking globally for other opportunities for permanent carbon dioxide storage and that the Northern Lights solution of deep geological sequestration in an offshore saline aquifer under the North Sea represents an ideal alternative site.

To develop its technology, Climeworks has raised over $150 million from investors including the Swiss lender Zuercher Kantonalbank.

For its part, Northern Lights is already planning on capturing carbon dioxide from industrial point sources in the Oslo region, which will then be shipped to an onshore terminal on the Norwegian coast. A facility there will transport the liquefied carbon dioxide by pipeline to an offshore storage location 1.62 miles below the seabed in the North Sea.

“Northern Lights is offering carbon capture and sequestration as a service. From the idea of doing this project and from the early days of working with the ministry … my biggest surprise was the level of interest in [carbon capture and sequestration] among emitters in Europe,” said Jacobsen. “This awareness. This interest. And the need to find a solution is accelerating. We are talking about what are the possibilities and what are the solutions. Northern Lights offers a great part of the value chain.”

Some companies are already interested in becoming early customers for the project, Jacobsen said. “We have a number of MOUs and confidentiality agreements with customers and letters of support. Big interest in discussing with us. The key will be that we have to bring conversations into agreements so that we can bring this business forward.”

The vast majority of startups remain focused on consumers, knowledge workers and the opportunities to provide services to those that are already operating completely, or at least partially, in digital environments. But today comes news of funding for a startup building a social network for what is probably one of the least digital business sectors of all: independent, small-hold farmers in the developing world.

Wefarm, a social networking platform aimed at independent farmers to help them meet each other, exchange ideas and get advice, and sell or trade equipment and supplies, has raised $11 million funding to continue expanding its business, which now has 2.5 million users.

To put that number and the growth opportunity into some perspective, Wefarm estimates that there are some 400 million small-hold farmers globally, with a large proportion of them in developing markets.

The funding, an extension to the company’s 2019 Series A, is being led by Octopus Ventures. True Ventures (which led the 2019 round), Rabo Frontier Ventures, LocalGlobe, June Fund and AgFunder also participated. Wefarm has raised $32 million since being founded in 2005.

To date, London-based Wefarm has primarily found traction in countries in East Africa. Its service is available via a website, but most of its users are accessing without any internet use at all, via the company’s SMS interface. The SMS format has now hosted more than 37 million conversations from farmers engaging in around 400 different types of farming (from livestock or dairy to grains and fruits and vegetables) and $29 million in marketplace sales, the company said.

But rolling out SMS services can be slow, in part because it requires Wefarm to strike local deals with carriers over data usage. (That has also meant that the company has tightly controlled growth: if you go to the site, you’ll see that you can either join a waitlist or join by way of an invitation from an existing member.)

Kenny Ewan, Wefarm’s founder and CEO, said this latest tranche of funding in part will be used to roll out an app (currently in beta) that will help it launch in more countries and pick up more farmers.

“The big step we’re taking is going from SMS a digital, app-based service, which will remove the digital barrier,” he said in an interview. “We compare it to the shift from sending DVDs in the mail to streaming video online. We feel like the time is right and believe it could take us to the 100 million mark of users.”

From pandemics to locust plagues

Wefarm’s role in helping link up independent farmers — traditionally and by its nature one of the most analogue of industries — has taken on an interesting profile particularly in the last year.

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown a stark light on a number of digital divides in the world, and one of most distinctive has been in the wider world of business. Entrepreneurs, companies and organizations that had digital strategies in place could hit the ground running to adapt to a “new normal” with less physical interaction. Those that did not had to scramble to get there to avoid a nosedive in activity.

Image Credits: Wefarm (opens in a new window)

Wefarm was around for years before the Covid-19 pandemic, and in some regards it has always been championing and giving a digital voice to the underdogs.

The wider agricultural industry — globally a multi-trillion dollar enterprise, accounting for up to 25% of GDP in some markets — has undergone some significant digital transformation, but that has been focused on tools and other technology for the agribusiness sector, which includes the giant conglomerates and multinationals like Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bayer (Monsanto’s parent), John Deere and others.

Wefarm’s importance (and often singular presence) as a tool for independent farmers to communicate, trade and generally network with others like them was already playing out before Covid-19. When we covered the company’s previous raise in 2019 (the first part of its Series A, a $13 million round) it had already grown to 1.9 million members. And, as it happens, for many of its users, Covid-19 was in some regards the least of their concerns:

“In reality a lot of people in rural Africa were concerned about the weather, or the effect of a locust plague,” Ewan said. “What we saw was traffic around not Covid, but these topics. They had different preoccupations.”

But the pandemic has had an impact, nevertheless. On the platform itself, as we saw in other e-commerce scenarios, Wefarm emerged as an essential service for trading at a time when in-person meetings were halted. As for Wefarm as a business, Ewan said that it essentially meant that the company’s country expansion plans had completely halted mainly because business development teams could no longer travel as they had before: another reason why launching an app could be a useful growth tool.

(That lack of travel was also potentially helpful to Wefarm: despite that the company still managed to grow by 600,000 more users, Ewan pointed out, underscoring a clear demand for the service among its target audience.)

Going forward, there are other ways in which Wefarm aims to leverage its user base, its network and the data that it potentially can amass from them.

“We see the possibility of providing more analytics and data. Our users want that very much,” Ewan said. “We now know more about small scale farmers than any one else, because they talk to us.” Areas that Wefarm is considering to develop over the next two years are whether it can help provide more insight into more workable business models, pricing models and more data on particular aspects like ripening periods.

“By building a highly engaged community of millions of small-holder farmers, Wefarm has created a powerful platform providing greater access to vital knowledge and information, which allows farmers to unlock greater economic potential from their land,” said Kamran Adle, early stage investor at Octopus Ventures. “In practice that might mean understanding which fertilisers work best, what the market price is for certain goods, or new farming techniques that result in better yields, all of which can make a significant difference to livelihoods. It’s also an enormous market with more than 400 million small-holder farmers globally who collectively spend around $400 billion on farming inputs. There is a huge opportunity for Kenny and the team at Wefarm to achieve incredible scale and we’re excited for the launch of its digital platform which will further accelerate growth.”

Israel-based Ibex Medical Analytics, which has an AI-driven imaging technology to detect cancer cells in biopsies more efficiently, has raised a $38 million Series B financing round led by Octopus Ventures and 83North. Also participating in the round was aMoon, Planven Entrepreneur Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, the corporate venture arm of Dell Technologies. The company has now raised a total of $52 million since its launch in 2016. Ibex plans to use the investment to further sell into diagnostic labs in North America and Europe.

Originally incubated out of the Kamet Ventures incubator, Ibex’s “Galen” platform mimics the work of a pathologist, allowing them to diagnose cancer more accurately and faster and derive new insights from a biopsy specimen.

Because rates of cancer are on the rise and the medical procedures have become more complex, pathologists have a higher workload. Plus, says Ibex, there is a global shortage of pathologists, which can mean delays to the whole diagnostic process. The company claims pathologists can be 40% more productive using its solution.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Joseph Mossel, Ibex CEO and Co-founder said: “You can think of it as a pathologist’s assistant, so it kind of prepares the case in advance, marks the regions of interest, and allows the pathologist to achieve the efficiency gains.”

He said the company has secured the largest pathology network in France, and LD path, which is five pathology labs that service 24 NHS trusts in the UK, among others.

Michael Niddam, of Kamet Ventures said Ibex was an “excellent example of how Kamet works with founders very early on.” Ibex founders Joseph Mossel and Dr. Chaim Linhart had previously joined Kamet as Entrepreneurs in Residence before developing their idea.

Each of the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — has a marketplace where software vendors can sell their wares. It seems like an easy enough proposition to throw your software up there and be done with it, but it turns out that it’s not quite that simple, requiring a complex set of business and technical tasks.

Tackle, a startup that wants to help ease the process of getting a product onto one of these marketplaces, announced a $35 million Series B today. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment with help from existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The company reports it has now raised $48.5 million.

Company founder Dillon Woods says that at previous jobs, he found that it took several months with a couple of engineers dedicated to the task to get a product onto the AWS marketplace, and he noticed that it was a similar set of tasks each time.

“What I saw [in my previous jobs] was that we were kind of redoing the same work. And I thought everybody out there was probably reinventing the same wheel. And so when I started Tackle, my goal was to create a software platform that would take that time down to one or two days. So it’s really a no code solution, and it makes it much more of a business decision, rather than this big technical integration project,” Woods told me.

While you may think it’s a pretty simple task to put an app on one of these marketplaces, Woods points out that the AWS user guide explaining the ins and outs is a 700 page pdf. He says that it’s not just the technical complexity of setting up the various API calls to get it connected, there is also the business side of selling in the marketplace, and that requires additional APIs.

“There’s not just the initial sale. There could be things later like upgrades, refunds, cancellations — maybe you need to do overage charges against that same contract. And so there are all of these downstream things that happen that all require API integration, and Tackle takes care of all of that for you,” Woods explained.

CEO John Jahnke says that the company usually starts with one product in one marketplace, which acts as a kind of proof of concept for the customer, then builds up from there. Once customers see what Tackle can do, they can expand usage.

It seems to be working with the startup reporting that it tripled annual recurring revenue (ARR), although it didn’t want to share a specific number. It also doubled headcount and the number of customers and was responsible for over $200 million in transactions across the three cloud marketplaces.

Jahnke didn’t share the exact number of customers, but he said there were currently hundreds on the platform including companies like Snowflake, GitHub, New Relic and PagerDuty.

The company currently has 67 employees spread across 25 states with plans to almost double that by the end of 2021. He says that it’s essential to put systems in place to build a diverse company now.

“How we scale through this next 100% increase in headcount is going to define the mix of the company into the future. If we can get this right right now and continue to extend on the foundation for diversity and inclusion that we started and make it a real part of our conversation at some scale, we think we’ll be set up as we go from 100 employees to 1000 employees over the long period of time to continue to grow and create opportunities for people wherever they are,” Jahnke said.

Martin Casado, general partner at lead investor a16z, says this type of selling has become essential for businesses and that’s why he wanted to invest in the company. “Cloud marketplaces have become a primary channel for selling software quickly and conveniently. Tackle is the leading player for enabling companies to sell software through the cloud,” he said.

YL Ventures, the Israel-focused cybersecurity seed fund, today announced that it has sold its stake cybersecurity asset management startup Axonius, which only a week ago announced a $100 million Series D funding round that now values it at around $1.2 billion.

ICONIQ Growth, Alkeon Capital Management, DTCP and Harmony Partners acquired YL Venture’s stake for $270 million. This marks YL’s first return from its third $75 million fund, which it raised in 2017, and the largest return in the firm’s history.

With this sale, the company’s third fund still has six portfolio companies remaining. It closed its fourth fund with $120 million in committed capital in the middle of 2019.

Unlike YL, which focuses on early-stage companies — though it also tends to participate in some later-stage rounds — the investors that are buying its stake specialize in later-stage companies that are often on an IPO path. ICONIQ Growth has invested in the likes of Adyen, CrowdStrike, Datadog and Zoom, for example, and has also regularly partnered with YL Ventures on its later-stage investments.

“The transition from early-stage to late-stage investors just makes sense as we drive toward IPO, and it allows each investor to focus on what they do best,” said Dean Sysman, co-founder and CEO of Axonius. “We appreciate the guidance and support the YL Ventures team has provided during the early stages of our company and we congratulate them on this successful journey.”

To put this sale into perspective for the Silicon Valley- and Tel Aviv-based YL Ventures, it’s worth noting that it currently manages about $300 million. Its current portfolio includes the likes of Orca Security, Hunters and Cycode. This sale is a huge win for the firm.

Its most headline-grabbing exit so far was Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $410 million in 2019, but it has also seen exits of its portfolio companies to Microsoft, Proofpoint, CA Technologies and Walmart, among others. The fund participated in Axonius’ $4 million seed round in 2017 up to its $58 Million Series C round a year ago.

It seems like YL Ventures is taking a very pragmatic approach here. It doesn’t specialize in late-stage firms — and until recently, Israeli startups always tended to sell long before they got to a late-stage round anyway. And it can generate a nice — and guaranteed — return for its own investors, too.

“This exit netted $270 million in cash directly to our third fund, which had $75 million total in capital commitments, and this fund still has 6 outstanding portfolio companies remaining,” Yoav Leitersdorf, YL Ventures’ founder and managing partner, told me. “Returning multiple times that fund now with a single exit, with the rest of the portfolio companies still there for the upside is the most responsible — yet highly profitable path — we could have taken for our fund at this time. And all this while diverting our energies and means more towards our seed-stage companies (where our help is more impactful), and at the same time supporting Axonius by enabling it to bring aboard such excellent late-stage investors as ICONIQ and Alkeon – a true win-win-win situation for everyone involved!”

He also noted that this sale achieved a top-decile return for the firm’s limited partners and allows it to focus its resources and attention toward the younger companies in its portfolio.

Israel-based ForSight Robotics announced today that it has raised $10 million for what it has deemed a “mega-seed round.” Led by Eclipse Ventures and Mithril Capital, the round will go toward expanding the company’s headcount and global reach, as it looks to bring its offerings to international markets, pending the sorts of regulatory approvals that go into launching a robotic surgery platform.

The company’s surgical platform is designed specifically for ophthalmological (eye) surgeries — a category requiring a great deal of precision. It’s also one in great demand. The company cites a recent study from the British Journal of Ophthalmology, putting the number of qualified eye surgeons at around 72 per million people in developed nations and a mere 3.7 surgeons per million in developed countries.

“It’s a proprietary technology that we developed. It includes robotics, visualization and machine learning,” co-founder and CEO Daniel Glozman tells TechCrunch. “Together, this will allow physicians to democratize surgeries. All physicians around the world will be able to perfect this procedure and perform ophthalmic procedures in a more uniform way.”

ForSight has an impressive pedigree for an early-stage startup. Notably, Intuitive Surgical and Auris Health co-founder Dr. Fred Moll sits on the company’s the strategic advisory board, along with Mako Surgical’s Rony Abovitz and Mithril’s Ajay Royan. Joining them are a half-dozen ophthalmic surgeons rounding out the clinical advisory board.

As we noted last year, medical and surgical startups have been a hot category for VCs — particularly in the seed stage, which accounts for about a quarter of total funding. Some 600-700 companies received funding in 2019. ForSight seems to have the pedigree and interest to match. The company’s goal is to offer its technology to a variety of different markets, in order to level the playing field for access to quality eye surgery.

In the wake of International Women’s Day, a group of leading VC funds are grouping together to offer remote office hours for 250-plus women founders from across Europe on May 6th this year. Women founders who want to apply can see more information here and apply for the opportunity here.

The initiative aims to dispense with the need for “warm introductions”. Each founder will have the opportunity to meet four investors during one hour of remote office hours to discuss their tech business idea, ask for advice, pitch for investment, or find a mentor.

The event is being held jointly by Playfair Capital, Tech Nation and Google for Startups. Participants include Atomico, Creandum, Dawn, Balderton, EQT, Notion, LocalGlobe, Partech and Sequoia.

A spokesman for Playfair said the previous four editions saw a total of 2,000 individual mentoring sessions with 490 founders and 105 investors taking part. To date, 18% of founders went on to raise funding after attending an event, including the founders of Organise, SideQuest, Paid, Freyda and Juno.

Playfair says the event will use “AI matching technology” between founders and investors to further optimize funding outcomes from the event.

Chris Smith, managing partner at Playfair Capital, commented: “The support from the ecosystem has been incredible and we are hugely grateful to all the investors who have thrown their weight behind this event. Starting to hear some of the success stories from previous events is incredibly exciting and early proof that by collaborating at scale and taking a long-term view we can really make an impact.”

Over the past several months, OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei has turned his concept for “Nothing” into one of the buzziest hardware companies in recent memory. It’s an impressive feat for a company that has offered close to zero information about its upcoming offerings. The company has raised around $22 million, including a $15 million Series A last month, led by GV.

Nothing recently announced that it will be releasing its first product — wireless earbuds — over the summer. It’s a familiar and saturated category for a self-styled boundary-busting startup. Of course, plenty said that about smartphones, prior to the launch of the OnePlus One in 2014, and they seem to be doing pretty okay for themselves.

In a blog post today, Pei breaks down a bit more of Nothing’s philosophy, along with “Concept 1,” a precursor to the forthcoming unveiling of the company’s first product — call it next to Nothing, if you must. While the post uses a similarly hyperbolic language as Apple to outline its plans, ultimately Pei points at an approach that is, in some ways a kind of antithesis to Cupertino.

The product is built with a semi-transparent design, as part of an approach that features, “No screens, no dedicated devices, just barely-noticeable technology that empowers us to be more human.” If the screen-less bit is to be believed, in spite of the company’s acquisition of Essential IP, it doesn’t seem that Nothing is going to be launching a phone anytime soon.

Another interesting piece of the puzzle is inspiration from familiar objects. “Concept 1 takes inspiration from a grandmother’s tobacco pipe.” The company announced in late-February that it would be teaming with Teenage Engineering in a partnership that makes the design house’s CEO Jesper Kouthoofd the hardware company’s design lead.

Nothing certainly gets credit for getting the most out of the pre-release hype cycle. Between some solid funding and all of the fan goodwill Pei built up during his time at OnePlus, the company’s first release is shaping up to be one of the more eagerly anticipated hardware announcements of the year — which is no small feat for a pair of wireless earbuds.

Plan A, a Berlin-based automated SaaS B2B startup, has raised $3 million for its platform that lets companies measure, monitor, reduce and report their environmental footprint thus improving their ESG ratings. French VC Demeter led the round, with German VC Coparion and Softbank joined the round as a strategic investor. The cash will be used to enhance Plans A’s carbon emission and ESG management software for enterprise customers in Europe, and for international expansion.

Some estimates put the market for emission management solutions at between $10 billion and $26 billion in the next five years. The US Green Deal and new “EU taxonomy for sustainable activities” is putting pressure on businesses to manage their carbon emissions, leading to the ride of platforms like Plan A. Emitwise in the UK has raised $3.4M and there is also while Watershed. However, Plan A says its platform is more comprehensive than other players because of its ongoing automation and monitoring of a company’s carbon output.

Founded in 2017, Plan A has managed to garner customers including Société Générale, GANNI, AlbionVC, BMW Foundation, BCG Digital Ventures and football club Werder Bremen.

Lubomila Jordanova, co-founder and CEO of Plan A, said: “Plan A’s technology has transformed companies and enabled them to turn sustainability into a competitive advantage. We have been working for multiple years on developing the best in class technology, and this investment will allow us to further tailor our carbon and ESG management platform to the needs of enterprises worldwide.”

Olivier Bordelanne, partner at Demeter: “There is a high demand for B2B monitoring services and platforms providing data-based insights on companies’ sustainability indicators or climate risk exposures. Among the many companies offering carbon footprint measurements that we have studied recently, Plan A and its team stood out by positioning themselves as the one-stop shop to help businesses calculate, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint via mitigation and offsetting actions.”

Alexander Lüttge, Partner at Coparion, said: “Plan A offers companies an easy-to-integrate and easy-to-use SaaS solution for carbon footprint transparency, mitigation and offsetting. In our view, their solution is not only the most versatile product for automated emissions data collection in the market, it also creates transparency in emission and cost structures, as well as a significant value-add for companies through the introduction of automated business process optimization.”

Jordanova says competitors tend to calculate carbon footprints on a one-off basis, help with offsetting and then give certificates for the offsetting without supporting doing any further work. “We offer all of those services, but also enable the company to reduce its carbon footprint and learn how to implement sustainability on an ongoing basis,” she told me.

Plan A is in a good place to benefit from new regulatory environments. The new US administration and the EU have been significantly shifting their agenda, requiring a lot more transparency on reporting about emissions. In the Netherlands, more than 90 banks signed an agreement to create more transparency on CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, money is being divested from fossil fuels and diverted into ESG investments. But of course, companies wanting to get hold of that cash have to be able to prove their emissions. That’s where Plan A comes in.