Today, Isometric is announcing a $25m seed financing to solve the most important problem of our generation.
We’ve launched a Science Platform and are building the first independent Registry for durable carbon removal. Together, these two products will accelerate the growth of the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry by open sourcing key information and establishing a new high bar for the quality of CDR credits—in order to build confidence in carbon markets.
This is the most important problem of our generation
Isometric needs to exist because the CDR industry is growing fast. Large catalytic buyers such as the $1bn+ Frontier Fund (from Alphabet, J.P. Morgan, McKinsey, Meta, Stripe, Shopify and more) are looking for quality, and suppliers are emerging to meet this demand.
The growth of CDR is not optional, per scientific consensus. While the world is currently only durably removing a few kilotonnes of carbon annually, the industry needs to grow to at least 3.8 gigatonnes per year by 2050—and potentially to much larger—to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
That’s where Isometric comes in. By accelerating the development of nascent CDR technologies, and firmly grounding them in robust science, we support the push towards making the technologies more scalable and the credits more affordable. And from there, it’s full steam (turbines?!) ahead to reversing the damage caused by climate change.
The Science Platform
Today, we launch our Science Platform. Think GitHub for climate science.
The Science Platform is a community resource that enables suppliers to host and visualize their early processes, removal data and protocols in a clear and consistent way—allowing the scientific community to share feedback and advice.
We’ve already received tremendous feedback on the product, and will add more suppliers to the platform over the coming months. You can learn more about it here.
The Registry
We’re building a carbon registry unlike any other—underpinned by four key principles:
- Scientific rigor
- Isometric uses the latest science to quantify net negativity, durability, uncertainty and additionality across a variety of heterogeneous carbon removal pathways.
- The resulting credits are of a higher quality than anything seen in carbon markets to date.
- Transparency
- The Isometric platform is built on the full traceability of carbon fluxes. Versioning allows the ecosystem to track changes as the science evolves. All data is available for inspection by the scientific community in real-time.
- Trust isn’t built behind closed doors.
- Incentive alignment
- Isometric doesn’t sell or broker the sale of carbon removal tonnes and charges buyers—not suppliers—a single flat fee per offtake or purchase. The fee covers all the costs associated with developing protocols, verifying removals and issuing credits.
- In this way, we minimize conflicts of interest in running our registry.
- Collaboration
- Isometric actively engages the scientific community and partners with experts in sensor development, physical inspection, auditing, earth-system modeling and data analysis to verify deliveries—including accredited VVBs.
- We invite anyone working on monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) to reach out to us so that we can partner.
Our team
The Isometric team consists of world-class talent from climate science and technology.
Our science team is led by Elizabeth Troein, Ph.D. (formerly ARPA-E, MIT, Columbia and Princeton), a respected industry leader in carbon removal. Her team is composed of scientists from universities including Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard and Stanford.
Ola Sitarska and Ellie Romer-Lee lead our technology and operations teams, which boast talent from companies including Amazon, Intercom, Meta, Palantir, Shopify and Wise (the list goes on…).
This is the most remarkable group of experts who are obsessed with solving this problem. I’m proud to be leading them.
If you want to join our journey, reach out and help us avert climate disaster.
Our investors
Investors of the highest caliber have placed their faith in Isometric.
Khaled Helioui at Plural was an early backer of my first company, Onfido, almost a decade ago. I was fortunate enough to have him as a trusted advisor, mentor and friend to lean on during my toughest times. It’s a pleasure to be able to work together again.
Ryan Orbuch at Lowercarbon Capital spent months helping me formulate the thinking behind Isometric before investing in the company. His depth of knowledge, experience and thoughtfulness when it comes to carbon removal are unparalleled. Ryan has now joined Isometric's board.
The future
If we’re successful in our mission, we’ll end up building the critical pillar underpinning carbon removal—the most important industry of the coming decades.
This is the most urgent thing to work on, and we’re doing everything we can to create the future we want to live in.
Cover image by United States Geological Survey
