Today Spain’s ClimateTrade, the blockchain climate marketplace, announced it raised a European €7 million ($8m) pre-Series A funding round. Backers include Telefónica’s Wayra, SIX Fintech Ventures, ClearSky, Conexo Ventures, Borderless Capital, Algorand and others. Borderless previously invested €1 million in the company’s seed round in late 2020 and Algorand is the public blockchain that ClimateTrade uses.
The company plans to re-incorporate in Miami later this year, at which point it expects to raise an additional €13 million ($14.7m). It has more than 300 companies registered on its platform and its clients include Cabify, Banco Santander, Telefónica, state-owned postal service Correos and Telégrafos, and Prosegur. It plans to use the funds for international expansion.
We previously wrote about ACCIONA, the Spanish generator of renewable energy, that inked a deal with ClimateTrade in early 2020. The energy firm generates 24,000 Gigawatt hours of power annually. As part of the deal, ACCIONA provides the ClimateTrade marketplace with Certified Emission Reduction (CER) certificates – a type of carbon credit – generated by its plants in emerging countries such as Mexico, Chile, and Costa Rica. Banco Santander agreed with ACCIONA to use the CERs to offset 145,000 tons of the bank’s CO2 emissions.
“For four years, ClimateTrade’s vision has been to enable climate action through technological innovation,” said Francisco Benedito, ClimateTrade’s CEO. “Our blockchain-backed marketplace allowed companies to offset almost 2 million tons of CO2 in 2021 alone. This oversubscribed funding round is a testament to the impact ClimateTrade has already generated.”
While ClimateTrade was one of the first to use blockchain for transaction traceability, others are getting into the space. In Singapore, DBS, SGX, StanChart, and Temasek are planning Climate Impact X (CIX) to use blockchain for carbon credit trading. And four banks from across the globe, CIBC, Itaú Unibanco, National Australian Bank, and NatWest Group have partnered to launch Project Carbon, a Voluntary Carbon Marketplace using blockchain.
