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The carbon offset API developer Patch confirms a $4.5 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz
Patch, the carbon offset API developer, has raised $4.5 million in financing to build out its business selling customers a way to calculate their carbon footprint and identify and finance offset projects that capture the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions associated with that footprint.
Confirming TechCrunch reporting, Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which also included previous investors VersionOne Ventures, MapleVC and Pale Blue Dot Ventures.
Patch’s application protocol interface works for both internal and customer-facing operations. The company’s code can integrate into the user experience on a company’s internal site to track things like business flights for employees, recommending and managing the purchase of carbon credits to offset employee travel.
The software allows companies to choose which projects they’d like to finance to support the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with projects ranging from the tried and true reforestation and conservation projects to more high-tech early-stage technologies like direct air capture and sequestration projects, the company said.
Patch founders Brennan Spellacy and Aaron Grunfeld, two former employees at the apartment rental service Sonder, stressed in an interview that the company’s offset work should not be viewed as an alternative to the decarbonization of businesses that use its service. Rather, they see Patch’s services as a complement to other work companies need to do to transition away from a reliance on fossil fuels in business operations.
Patch co-founders Brennan Spellacy and Aaron Grunfeld. Image Credit: Patch
Patch currently works with 11 carbon removal suppliers and has plans to onboard another 10 before the end of the first quarter, the company said. These are companies like CarbonCure, which injects carbon dioxide into cement and fixes it so that it’s embedded in building materials for as long as a building lasts.
“Carbon removal credits can help to dramatically accelerate the deployment of technologies like CarbonCure’s, which are absolutely critical to helping us reach our global climate targets. Demand for high-quality, permanent credits is sky-rocketing, and listing credits on Patch will help us to attract a broader range of buyers,” said Jennifer Wagner, president of CarbonCure Technologies, in a statement.
It also has around 15 customers already using its service, according to earlier TechCrunch reporting. Those buyers include companies like TripActions and the private equity firm EQT, which intends to extend the integration of Patch’s API from its own operations to those of its portfolio companies down the road, according to Spellacy.
Grunfeld said that the company would be spending the money to hire more staff and developing new products. From its current headcount of six employees, Patch intends to bring on another 24 by the end of the year.
As the company expands, it’s looking to some of the startups providing carbon emissions audit and verification services as a channel that the company’s API can integrate with and sell through. These would be businesses like CarbonChain, Persefoni and another Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies.
“An increasing number of businesses are taking leadership positions in an effort to reduce emissions to try to counteract global warming,” said Jeff Jordan, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Patch makes it much easier for companies to add carbon removal to their core business processes, aggregating verified carbon-removal supply and offering turn-key access to it to companies through an easy-to-implement API.”
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Autonomous trucking startup Einride eyes US market with $25 million in new funding
Einride, the Swedish autonomous vehicle startup known for its futuristic pods designed to haul freight, has raised $25 million in a Series A round that will be used to fund its expansion into the United States.
The round was co-led by EQT Ventures and NordicNinja VC, a fund backed by Panasonic, Honda, Omron and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Other investors joining the round include Ericsson Ventures, Norrsken Foundation, Plum Alley Investments and Plug and Play Ventures. The startup has raised $32 million to date.
Einride’s self-driving vehicle isn’t quite a truck, although it’s meant to perform the same freight-hauling tasks. The company’s T-Pod electric vehicle, which was unveiled in 2017, has been running on public roads since May of this year.
Einride, which was founded in 2016, has landed several customer contracts, including logistics provider DB Schenker and supermarket chain Lidl. Einride has a commercial pilot with DB Schenker. The startup said it has also signed on “large U.S.-based retail companies,” without naming them.
The funds will be used to hire more people, invest in its software platform and expand internationally, notably the U.S., according to the company. Einride plans to open a U.S. office next year.
“Our ambition is to disrupt the transport industry and closing our series A brings us one step closer to that goal,” Einride co-founder and CEO Robert Falck. “The funding will allow us to start expanding in the U.S., deliver on our technology road map and to meet rapidly increasing customer demand.”
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Suse is once again an independent company
Open-source infrastructure and application delivery vendor Suse — the company behind one of the oldest Linux distributions — today announced that it is once again an independent company. The company today finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus, which itself had acquired it back in 2014.
Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business. Suse was first acquired by Novell in 2004. Novell was then acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which Micro Focus acquired in 2014. The company then turned Suse into an independent division, only to then announce its sale to EQT in the middle of 2018.
It took a while for Micro Focus and EQT to finalize the acquisition, though, but now, for the first time since 2004, Suse stands on its own.
Micro Focus says that when it acquired Attachmate Group for $2.35 billion, Suse generated just 20 percent of the group’s total revenues. Since then, Suse has generated quite a bit more business as it expanded its product portfolio well beyond its core Linux offerings and into the more lucrative open-source infrastructure and application delivery business by, among other things, offering products and support around massive open-source projects like Cloud Foundry, OpenStack and Kubernetes.
Suse CEO Nils Brauckmann will remain at the helm of the company, but the company is shaking up its executive ranks a bit. Enrica Angelone, for example, has been named to the new post of CFO at Suse, and Sander Huyts is now the company’s COO. Former Suse CTO Thomas Di Giacomo is now president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. All three report directly to Brauckmann.
“Our genuinely open, open source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them,” said Brauckmann in today’s announcement. “Our ability to consistently meet these market demands creates a cycle of success, momentum and growth that allows SUSE to continue to deliver the innovation customers need to achieve their digital transformation goals and realize the hybrid and multi-cloud workload management they require to power their own continuous innovation, competitiveness and growth.”
Since IBM recently bought Red Hat for $34 billion, though, it remains to be seen how long Suse’s independent future will last. The market for open source is only heating up, after all.
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