Announcing Evergrow

We raised a $7M seed round to catalyze project finance for carbon reduction.

I’m excited to announce that we raised a $7M seed round for Evergrow. The round was co-led by Ross Fubini at XYZ and Abe Yokell at Congruent, both of whom have joined our Board. Also in the round were First Round Capital, Garuda Ventures, Skyview Ventures, My Climate Journey, Zach Perrett (CEO, Plaid), Max Mullen (Co-founder, Instacart), Justin Kan (Co-founder, Twitch), Peter Reinhardt (CEO, Charm Industrial), Maddie Hall (CEO, Living Carbon), Michael Tanenbaum (CFO, Brex), Erica Dorfman (SVP Capital Markets, Brex), Karen Karniol-Tambour (Co-CIO for Sustainability, Bridgewater Associates), and others.

It's no secret that we urgently need to decarbonize our economy and remove tens of billions of tons of carbon emissions from the atmosphere to combat and reverse climate change. This will require the deployment of trillions of dollars worth of new infrastructure projects, from clean power plants to alternative fuel refineries to direct air capture facilities and more. The faster we build these projects, the better we will fare in our fight against climate change.

At Evergrow, we create systems that direct and accelerate the deployment of capital to projects that avoid and remove carbon emissions. Our mission is to ensure our future on Earth by enabling and accelerating every project that reduces humanity’s carbon footprint, and our plan is to support the permanent avoidance or removal of 1 billion tons of CO2e by 2030, scaling to 1 billion tons/year shortly thereafter.

We're getting started by providing offtake contracts to projects that produce carbon commodities. An offtake contract is a promise to buy a commodity at a fixed price over an extended period of time, typically a decade or longer. This has the effect of providing a guaranteed, long-term revenue stream for commodity projects, making them easy to finance. Unfortunately, offtake contracts have to date been very hard to get for carbon commodities, which has, in turn, made it difficult to finance and build carbon reduction projects. 

Evergrow is filling this gap by using technology, data, and finance to deliver high-quality offtake contracts for carbon commodities. Said another way: we’re paying people to reduce and remove carbon emissions and helping them monetize their carbon commodities. Our aim is to unlock project finance for carbon reduction and catalyze a flywheel of new project development to accelerate our transition to a carbon-neutral civilization. 

Generally, one carbon commodity represents one ton of carbon emissions. There are many types of carbon commodities, including low carbon fuel standard credits, emissions allowances, renewable energy certificates, and carbon offsets. Nearly $300BN worth of carbon commodities are traded every year (and more in the derivatives market), mostly in regulated markets like the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and the California Cap & Trade Program. 

There is legitimate debate around the quality of certain carbon commodities, particularly in the non-regulated voluntary offset market. We agree that not all carbon commodities are created equal. Nonetheless, we believe that with proper regulation and discernment, the carbon commodity markets represent the most promising pathway to mobilizing collective action and capital at the scale and speed needed to confront the climate crisis, which is why we’re starting there.

Ultimately, we cannot fulfill our mission without the trust of the project developer and institutional investor communities, and it is our intent to earn this trust every day. To this end, we are also building a suite of products and services to support carbon project developers and an institutional-grade research team to demystify the carbon commodity market for investors. If you are a project developer or institutional investor and would like to learn more, please reach out.

Last, we are assembling the world’s best team in climate technology and finance. The climate crisis is an existential threat to all of us, and we’re betting on humanity to win. If you’d like to join us, please check out our jobs page and drop us a line.

James Richards
Co-founder & CEO
Evergrow