A company vows to turn our travels, weddings, and food carbon neutral! Bags a million dollars

• A start-up named ‘Climes’ helps brands like TEDx, MakeMyTrip, Zingbus and Wedding Brigade reduce their carbon footprint.
• Its fintech-enabled marketplace incentivises the movement of capital from individuals at points of consumption.
• The company claims to have neutralised around 46,000+ kg of carbon emissions across five large-scale events, including weddings.

At a time when the start-up ecosystem crawls through a harsh funding winter, sustainable investing has continued to thrive and promote innovative green start-ups.

Climes — a company that helps brands like TEDx, MakeMyTrip, Zingbus and Wedding Brigade reduce their carbon footprint — raised a million dollars on Tuesday, July 5. The $1.2 million round saw participation from Sequoia Capital India, Kalaari Capital, Avaana Capital, and even the Zerodha cofounder Nithin Kamath.

Climes — founded by former Airbus executive Anirudh Gupta and former investment professional at Kalaari Capital Siddhanth Jayaram — aims to minimise the effects of climate change by letting individuals take “climate action in a click of a button”.

Satyen Kothari of Cube Wealth, Anshuman Bapna of Terra.do, Keshav Reddy of Reddy Futures, Akshay Singhal from Log9 Materials and Smart Joules from Arjun Gupta also participated in the current round.

“Finance is the single biggest lever to solve climate change. Fantastic projects and solutions for carbon mitigation exist all around us. However, the finance needed to scale these projects is simply not flowing fast enough,” said the co-founders, Anirudh and Siddhanth.

How does ‘Climes’ work?

Climes is a fintech-enabled marketplace that incentivises the movement of capital from individuals at points of consumption to UN-approved carbon solution project developers on the ground in India.

“We partner with consumer brands that want to go climate-friendly. Every time you [customer] order or buy something from them, you get to see emissions specific to your order. And you can choose to take climate action at checkout,” the company’s website read.

The customers can simply pay marginally extra on their order to get some Clime coins, which the company allocates to different verified climatic projects. The platform claims the projects it works with have an impact on sanitisation and conservation, and empower local communities as well.

For example, a user can pay an additional ₹2 to neutralise their carbon footprint of 2 kg, produced during a bus ride from Mumbai to Pune. The company charges ₹1 for every 1kg of carbon footprint.

“The ideal solution towards climate change problems is to reduce consumption which may not be possible at all times. Making people aware of their carbon footprint and then making it available to offset may be a good mid-way path. We are excited to be a part of their journey and learn ourselves along the way,” says Nithin Kamath, Founder and CEO, Zerodha and Rainmatter.

Vani Kola, Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, said, “The rising awareness of the need for carbon-neutral lifestyle and climate costs require urgent new solutions. Entrepreneurs offering solutions with climate sensitiveness can create key differentiating propositions… Climes’ solution makes it possible for brands to embark on that transition by allowing customers to carbon-neutralise every transaction.”

Climes plans to use this capital for two aspects: First, integrate its technology with other customer-facing brands in the fashion, food, travel, beauty and personal care industry. Second, to expand its tech-stack to onboard high-quality climate solutions within India, as well as measure and report impact transparently.

The company claims to have neutralised 26,000+ kg of carbon emissions across three weddings so far, in addition to 15,000+ kgs of carbon emissions in Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) 2022 and 5,000+ kg of carbon emissions at TedxSusMafia 2.0.

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