Greentrade completes pre-seed financing

The start-up, founded in 2022, offers a marketplace for the pre-financing of CO2 certificates from environmental projects. This is now also convincing capital providers from the USA.

The start-up Greentrade has received seven-figure pre-seed financing. The round is led by US venture capital firm Cerulean. Draft Ventures, Allegory and Flori Ventures also participated. Business angels and serial founders, including Tom O'Keefe and Sundeep Ahuja, partner at Climate Capital, also invested in the startup.

Katrin Klingenberg, Ulf Hackbarth, Carsten Hermann and Frederick Leuschner founded Greentrade in March 2022. The start-up aims to accelerate the financing of new CO2 projects. "Project developers have high upfront costs to set up ecological projects that reduce CO2 emissions and generate CO2 certificates in the future," says co-founder and CEO Leuschner. With the help of long-term purchase agreements, these project developers will now receive immediate financing.

The generation of CO2 certificates and all transactions are to be stored on a blockchain. This would allow CO2 emissions to be documented and verified. To this end, constantly updated information on CO2 storage is to be transferred to the blockchain. "The immutable records of the blockchain exclude any kind of data manipulation," Leuschner says.

According to Greentrade, the first CO2 certificates can be purchased in the fourth quarter of this year in the areas of forest conservation and ocean restoration.