San Francisco carbon removal platform Patch announced it has raised $55 million in Series B funding led by Energize Ventures and included Coatue Management and Andreessen Horowitz. The company to date has raised $80 million.
Patch hopes to provide the software infrastructure of the nascent carbon removal sector and facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers of carbon removals. The company also develops APIs that can allow customers to add carbon removal transactions to their website, for instance giving users the ability to offset the carbon output of their purchases on an e-commerce site.
The platform has 100 companies as its customers that can use Patch's platform to calculate their own carbon output and purchase offsets and removals from around 50 different projects, which include reforestation, kelp farming and more high tech solutions like direct air capture.
Most of the high tech carbon removal technologies such as direct air capture, carbon mineralization and ocean storage are still in their infancy and most of the companies in the space have not yet begun actually removing carbon, though a few large corporations have signed multimillion dollar pre-purchase agreements for the carbon removals.
"People typically ask for some form of either direct air capture or blue carbon, when carbon is sequestered away in ocean," said Patch CEO Brennan Spellacy. "Now, what actually gets transacted the most in the removal field, it's typically bio char, just because that's the available capacity there is today and it's typically more affordable."
Spellacy said the company will use the new funds to expand its footprint in Europe, where 40% of its current customers are located and it operates a London office. The company currently has around 60 employees, a number Spellacy says will likely increase to around 90 with the cash influx.
Patch was founded in 2020 by Spellacy and his co-founder Aaron Grunfeld who met working at the proptech Sonder, which manages short-term rentals.
The headline of this originally said the funding round was a series A when it was actually a series B.
