Carble closed a €300k funding round led by Antler, the global early-stage VC, to bring the first version of the product to the market. “We cannot offset our way out of climate change” – instead, Carble enables carbon insetting as a more scalable way to fight climate change. Carble’s platform aims to help the world avoid 1000 megaton of CO2 emissions by 2035, equivalent to the emissions caused by the whole aviation industry in 2020.

Noordwijk-based Carble is fighting climate change by financially compensating farmers for preventing deforestation. The payments to farmers are made by tropical commodity buyers like coffee and cocoa brands, who Carble helps by providing precise data about which farmers are performing deforestation-free agriculture. Now the company, founded in 2021 by Sander Reuderink, Noura Hanna and Lodewijk van der Meer, has just raised €300k of funding in a round led by global early-stage venture capital investor, Antler.

Tropical forest loss is the main driver of the high carbon footprint of tropical commodities like coffee, cocoa, tea and rubber. If tropical deforestation were a country, it would rank right behind China and the United States in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the 2021 IPCC2 report showed that ending tropical deforestation is the second most impactful intervention to reduce climate change today (only the transition to renewable energy sources is more impactful).

Carble’s proprietary software platform ingests satellite data containing information on carbon storage in agroforestry farms, then uses a machine learning algorithm to process this data, and finally presents the data to brands in an actionable format so they can reward deforestation-free farming at scale. This approach is aractive in that it helps brands to decarbonize their own supply chain, rather than offseing their carbon footprint through offseing projects that do not change anything in the brands’ internal operations. Furthermore, it directly contributes to reducing poverty in tropical commodity farmers, thereby giving brands double the social and environmental impact per dollar.

“Eight of the ten largest coffee brands and all major cocoa brands have announced their goals to significantly reduce their negative impact on the climate. Yet there are no solutions that effectively reduce deforestation and address poverty amongst farmers – two of the largest sustainability challenges that these brands face.”, says Sander Reuderink, co-founder and CEO of Carble. “With the Carble platform we aim to avoid 1000 megaton of CO2 emissions, protect 1 million hectares of tropical forest and generate 1 billion euros of additional income for 1 million tropical commodity farmers by 2035.”

The €300k funding round was led by a global early-stage VC Antler and also included angel investors and grants from the German government’s GIZ Coffee Innovation Fund and the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centre. This makes Carble one of the latest additions to Antler’s global portfolio of over 600 startups. With this funding, Carble is introducing the first version of their technology to the market, while already starting on their next fundraising round in order to double down on strong current customer demand.

Youri Doeleman, a Partner at Antler, comments: “At Antler we work with exceptional founders from day zero to create startups with significant growth potential. The Carble team brings together a truly unique set of backgrounds and skills to the problem they are solving. They have everything from brand and the farmer’s livelihood to the technology side. The team has impressed us with their high ambitions and execution focus and we are excited about the impact they will have in addressing climate change across the tropical commodity industry.”