Series C is for compliance and CORSIA
We are overjoyed to announce a US$32 million Series C raise; a thundering vote of confidence in our brilliant team and the value of independent carbon ratings.
The round is led by Temasek-founded GenZero, a decarbonisation-focused global investment firm headquartered in Singapore, with additional investment from the Japan Airlines and Translink Innovation Fund. Existing investors EDF Pulse Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Illuminate Financial, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Molten Ventures, Qima, and Quantum Innovation Fund also committed fresh capital. Thank you all.
We founded BeZero Carbon in April 2020 with a research-first mindset. To fuse traditional capital markets research practices with expertise in environmental sciences and technology. To think creatively about climate problems, and solutions.
Two years, and a few business models, later we launched as a global carbon ratings agency.
Since then, as we wrote in March 2022, May 2022, November 2022, and March 2024, our focus has been simple... carbon ratings.
We have a theory of change, and we believe in it.
Ratings as market infrastructure. Ratings as project-level, risk-based analysis. Ratings as a risk metric to make better decisions. Rating any project, at any stage, in any market. Rating more, better, faster. Ratings data and risk analytics as self-service tools via the BeZero Carbon Markets platform. Always independent ratings.
In under three years, our ratings, data, and scientific analysis have become critical to customers in tens of countries across six continents, including world leading companies. Thousands more individuals, businesses, market commentators, journalists, and institutions actively follow, reference or rely on our public headline ratings.
Carbon ratings have become mainstream. They are available via Bloomberg terminals (!). The United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen mentioned their importance. Regulators want to regulate them.
What matters is ratings are driving more money to projects with higher climate impacts, better practices, higher standards. Our latest research shows every incremental BeZero Carbon Rating notch on BeZero’s 8-point scale now commands an average 40% price premium.
Three years ago there was no correlation between price and quality, no tool to enable a race to the top, no systematic way to reward best practice or make sense of risk.
The speed at which ratings have become adopted in the market has been incredible. Having front row seats is the trip of a lifetime. A privilege in every way imaginable.
We want to keep going.
Our Series C is to expand ratings coverage across carbon markets: domestic, international, voluntary, CORSIA, and compliance. We want private business, net zero transition frameworks, standards, regulators, and governments to write our ratings approach into the rulebooks of carbon markets globally.
Our Series C is for our customers, for whom we will be investing in our products and productivity, via automation and the latest artificial intelligence techniques.
Our Series C is for our category-creating expert team that got us here; ever humble, ever curious, and always practising the transparency we preach.
Our Series C is to ensure carbon credits - project level carbon credits - become a vital part of the net zero armoury in the eyes of policymakers (alongside taxation, and cap and trade). Each of these accelerate net zero by putting a price on emissions. Cap and trade and carbon markets go further by allowing emitters to pay others for avoiding or removing emission. But only carbon credits:
Maximise climate impact per $ spent globally.
Transfer capital to the Global South.
Create a revenue stream for the preservation and restoration of nature.
Carry wide-ranging co-benefits beyond carbon.
Offer a market mechanism to fund innovative new technologies.
Our Series C is, in the end, our contribution to help carbon markets to blossom - see our report, $100bn for planet and people. This can only happen when carbon credits deliver on their fundamental use case - achieving climate action.
That requires a tool to understand and manage project risks over and above methodology-based issuance.
That’s where ratings and BeZero come in.