Opna Helps Corporates Invest In Carbon Removal. It Just Raised $6.5 Million With This 11slide Pitch Deck.

• Opna, a startup that helps fund carbon removal projects, just raised $6.5 million.
• This London-based startup hopes to become a popular platform for financing carbon projects.
• We only look at the 11-slide presentation used for fundraising.

Shilpika Gautam holds the Guinness World Record for longest paddleboard ride. From October 2016 to January 2017 he sailed the Ganges in India to draw attention to clean water and the climate crisis.

Gaumukh's trip to the Sundarbans mangroves was part of a two-year hiatus from the financial industry, where he had worked for ten years, to focus on the fundamental issues in the fight against climate change. have, understand.

"That was a pivotal moment for me," Gautam, who is now the founder of climate startup Opna, told Insider.

Opna, which helps companies invest in projects to eliminate or reduce carbon emissions, recently raised $6.5 million from European venture capital firm Atomico.

Founded in 2022 as Salt, the London-based startup helps companies find, fund and manage carbon removal projects. Ultimately, he wants to help close the financial carbon gap while helping companies reach net zero.

Net zero means removing the same amount of emissions from the atmosphere as is released. Carbon removal projects generate carbon credits, one equal to one tonne of CO2 removed or prevented from entering the atmosphere. Businesses can purchase credits and use them as proof of offsetting their emissions.

However, carbon credits have issues of quality and whether they actually represent a tonne of CO2 emissions saved or avoided. This has led to market instability and a shift towards direct financing of carbon removal projects through future purchases and long-term supply contracts.

Popularized by Stripe's Frontier Fund and used by Opna, the funding mechanism is designed to solve supply and demand issues in carbon removal projects. Because projects often focus on technologies that have not proven successful at scale, they find it difficult to obtain initial funding or demonstrate their effectiveness at scale.

Companies have the money to achieve net-zero emissions and these projects need financing, but a lack of in-house expertise, high transaction costs and labor-intensive processes pose obstacles to project financing for most companies, Gautam said.

This is exactly the problem Opna wants to solve: A company can use this platform to find pre-vetted carbon projects, finance them and manage their portfolio. For project developers, it serves to gain access to capital and ensure future demand.

According to Gautam, this is particularly important for project developers in the south of the planet. They may have difficulty accessing capital due to simple factors such as exchange rates, risk perceptions or because carbon markets are not yet sufficiently developed, he said.

"Developers on these projects often spend 6, 12, 18 months raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the project off the ground," he says.

“We need a flow of capital without prejudice or obstacles to projects in southern countries. That's really the core of what we want to do.

Gautam said Opna has its own risk management mechanism that extensively reviews projects to avoid failure of existing projects. The quality assessment considers 280 different data points from public and private sources, including the project developer's track record, capital requirements, technology risks and carbon sequestration potential.

"If we start sanctioning without really understanding the overall risk picture, a project that is developed first, is in a specific location or develops a specific type of technology, we will not get there," Gautam said. in terms of global carbon removal. objective.

The new funds will be used to further develop the risk management framework and increase the number of employees to 15 over the next 18 months. In the long term, Opna aims to become the leading platform for financing carbon projects. To achieve this goal, the company will also introduce additional services such as project finance and insurance.

Longtime investors Pale Blue Dot, MCJ Collective, Angelinvest and Tiny VC also participated in this round.

Check out the edited 11-slide presentation below:

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