Cerulean backs GreenTrade to offer carbon credits for forest conservation and ocean restoration

Nature-based solutions that avoid new emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere have the potential to deliver up to one-third of the emissions reduction necessary to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement.

In the last two months, Berlin-based Dryad raised €10.5 million in a Series A funding round, Amsterdam-based Thorizon brought in €12.5 million and Swedish carbon accounting engine Normative raked in €31 million in a Series B round to help businesses on their journeys towards net zero.

Joining the ranks to help mitigate climate change by enabling an additional 1 billion carbon credits supply by 2030, Berlin-based marketplace for forward financing nature-based carbon credits GreenTrade has raised a nearly seven-figure pre-seed round of funding. While the amount of the deal remains undisclosed, the round was led by US-based climate and Web3 VC firm Cerulean with participation of Draft Ventures, Allegory and Flori Ventures and angel investors and serial founders, including Tom O’Keefe and Sundeep Ahuja, partners at investment firm Climate Capital. 

Founded in 2022 by Katrin Klingenberg, Ulf Hackbarth, Carsten Hermann and Frederick Leuschner, the climate tech startup aims to accelerate the financing of new carbon projects by creating long-term offtake agreements with project developers and turning those contracts into digital tradable assets. Those non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are then made available for corporate buyers today. Corporate buyers reduce future price and access risk, while developers are able to secure funding for additional projects.

The platform’s first nature-based carbon credits will be available in Q4 of 2022 in the areas of forest conservation and ocean restoration. In the pipeline is the El Gato project, in partnership with German-Canadian NGO Wilderness International. The project consists of buying large pieces of undisturbed rainforest in Peru which are cataloged in the official land registry, offering permanent legal safeguards.

Talking about how the startup is building a marketplace for carbon credits from sustainable environmental projects, Frederick Leuschner, co-founder and CEO at GreenTrade said: “On the one hand, project developers face high up-front costs to generate carbon credits only in the future. On the other hand, companies committed to reducing their environmental impact are competing for a fast-dropping inventory of already existing credits. We use forward contracts to close this gap: project developers receive financing right away and corporate buyers get access to high-quality projects while protecting themselves against future price surges.”

Jahed Momand, general partner at Cerulean added: “Cerulean is an active investor within the intersection of climate tech and web3, and we look for teams building fundamental infrastructure necessary to scale climate impact. GreenTrade’s technology generates high-quality nature-based carbon credits, which face strong and increasing demand.”