Editor's note: Cloverly's company comes from Southern Company, not Southern Company Gas as stated in a previous version of this story.
What’s your carbon footprint? This isn’t a personal metric most people keep track of. But according to the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, the average American’s carbon footprint is substantial — around 48 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.
Cloverly, an Atlanta-based software company, wants to help sustainability-minded companies mitigate their carbon-cost of doing business. Cloverly provides an API (application program interfaces), which calculates the emissions created from a particular activity (shipping a package or flying cross country for a conference) and gives the user an opportunity to compensate for those emissions through carbon offsets.
“We provide an API that makes it easy for businesses to create neutral carbon experiences for customers in the digital commerce space,” said Anthony Oni, co-founder and CEO of Cloverly.
APIs are everywhere. They let Google Maps and Twitter feeds function on other websites. Simply put, APIs are “a way for computers and programs to easily talk to each other,” said David Folk, co-founder of Cloverly.
Cloverly’s API can integrate into an e-commerce website and allow customers to pay extra to offset the impact of their purchase. For all its conveniences, online shopping (and, thus, shipping) carries a hefty carbon price tag. To compensate for this cost, Cloverly allows customers and companies to purchase carbon offsets that help reduce that impact — from funding forest management to supporting renewable energy projects.
“Carbon offsets are a way to either avoid or sequester carbon in the environment,” Folk said. “It’s a market-based mechanism that allows for businesses or consumers to effectively offset the environmental impact of their activities. They do so by calculating the environmental impact of a particular thing and then use carbon offsets to neutralize that impact.”
Folk said he and Oni realized reporting carbon offsets “was an intensive, backwards and not really digitally enhanced process.” This inspired them to launch the company on Earth Day last year.
“We figured that if we made it easier to perform carbon offsets, then people would be more likely to perform them,” Folk said. “That would be better for the market, hopefully improve the economics of carbon offsets and hopefully benefit the environment.”
Cloverly has raised $2 million from Southern Company, an Atlanta-based utility holding company. The co-founders wouldn’t disclose the startup’s revenue but said the company has facilitated 150,000 transactions and helped offset 10.9 million pounds of carbon. The company currently employs three full-time employees.
Some of Cloverly’s clients include sustainable clothing companies like PACT and Modern Citizen, who utilize the API in their e-commerce site. Looker, a business intelligence startup acquired by Google last year, used Cloverly’s API to calculate and offset the emissions of its employees travel to a recent conference.
Moving forward, Cloverly wants to work with major emissions producers, such as airlines, to help them offset their impact and help customers feel a little bit better about their own environmental efforts.
“It's easy for customers to not feel like they're making a difference,” Folk said. “We're exploring how we can create solutions and software that helps consumers feel like they're actually having an impact when they use our service.”
