Interview with Carbonside

Samuel Wright

Sam is the Co-Founder of Carbonside and oversees all things Commercial and Growth. He has spent the past few years helping build and scale innovative businesses within SaaS and Fintech. With a desire to form his own entrepreneurial path, he graduated from NEF+ in August 2021. A program led by the Centre for Entrepreneurs, geared at developing and equipping the UK's top entrepreneurial talent with the necessary learnings and resources to start and scale businesses.

Could you elaborate on your journey to launching Carbonside?

So, Mike and I launched Carbonside just under two years ago now. We met during lockdown whilst working for a business called Just Park, digitising how people pay and book parking within the UK. During the lockdown, no one was parking because everyone was staying at home. I think; naturally, the business shifted its focus towards electric vehicles and how you can facilitate a smoother transition by affording community charging for electric vehicle drivers. Mike and I had the chance to work on a project together, essentially validating and building the basics for an EV charging network across the UK. Off the back of that, we sat down and realised that maybe there was an opportunity here for us to launch our own business. We realised that it wasn’t just back-office teams and fleet-based businesses that would be impacted by net zero and sustainability but actually that it was a problem every business would face regardless of funding stage, sector or geography. After this, we ultimately decided to pivot away from our original business idea, which was called GoLocate, towards what Carbonside is today.

What does Carbonside do?

Could you delve more into Carbonside’s cutting-edge software? We came to an early realisation that net zero looks different to everyone. Every single business we speak to has different goals, different ambitions, different degrees of in-house expertise and specialisms when it comes to addressing their sustainability strategy. As a result of this nuance, it's very, very difficult to create a ‘one size fits all’ solution because what we found was that we were going down this route of building out bespoke solutions. And then we were like, you know what? It would be so much simpler if we just had a universal API which businesses could embed on their end that would automatically feed all this data through to us. So, for us, the API allowed us to do something which was still bespoke in terms of service but also that was actually just centred around that core infrastructure, which we could then bend and flex to meet the specific requirements of our early customers. That was a real game-changer for us. I think within a few months of launching the API, we had customers across seven countries and three continents, and none of that would have been possible without the API because it did break down those barriers. In this sense, our API has become central to everything we do at Carbonside - allowing our customers to bring new, innovative and customisable products to market faster, often with reduced development costs and an improved customer experience.

What makes Carbonside different to other carbon emission platforms?

Helping businesses understand how they can go about capturing and securing data is a big element that sets us aside as a company. We take a stance of understanding that not every business is going to have all the data they need. The fact that they're having these conversations now shows that they're willing to work towards getting and obtaining those data points and are not closed off to the idea. When it comes to offering a helping hand, I think that's a big thing for us. We're very hands-on. We want to ultimately sit and operate as an extension of their business, which naturally lends itself to a consultative approach.So even though we're a completely different company, we are always on hand to offer any advice that may be needed around data, offsetting, the legitimacy of offsets, and also how you can quantify this impact over time. We support businesses by working to systematically reduce their carbon footprint at the core rather than just increasing the amount that's being offset. In an ideal world, we will merely be a stepping stone for businesses towards a greener future as opposed to the ‘end game’ solution. It means that we have done our job correctly and delivered against our mission… Although never rule anything out!?

What is Carbonside’s overall mission?

At our core, we believe that technology can help solve some of the world's greatest challenges and we're excited to bring our technology to businesses in a way that facilitates and drives a greener tomorrow. Outside of technology, breaking down barriers but doing it in a way that places transparency at heart is pivotal. For us, one of the main things we try, and pioneer here is transparency, but also diversification. Businesses shouldn't be tied just to planting trees but should ultimately diversify the resources and avenues they use to have an environmental impact. We work with a variety of partners to procure our carbon credits and offer a diverse range of over 160 offsetting projects worldwide. The primary goal is ultimately to enable businesses to have a social, economic and environmental impact. Yes, but also enabling them to choose projects which align with their company values. What you then do is build this sense of ownership within an organisation where the change comes from within, and employees are bought into the journey towards net zero. It's no longer something at the bottom of the website as part of their ESG pledge. It's something that they live and breathe and that they can relate to at all levels.?

What do you think is the importance of having meaningful and traceable offsetting projects in today's climate?

First and foremost, transparency is key because businesses should be able to see their impact at the click of a button. They shouldn't need to trawl through hundreds if not thousands of pieces of paper to ensure that where their time, energy and resources are being directed is legitimate. It should be seamless, and it should be available, readily available, whenever they need to see it, not just when it comes to auditing season. When you break down a business's carbon footprint, it's very easy to say a business has a carbon footprint of 100,000 tonnes, but when you break down those 100,000 tonnes, what does that actually look like? So, you've got Scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions. A lot of the movement within the market is currently focused on scope one and scope two because those are the easiest to calculate but it really doesn’t capture the full picture - this is where we come in.?

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in helping businesses reach Net-zero?

It's crazy to think that we're already almost two years into this journey, and I think the main challenge that we’ve faced is that a lot of businesses love to talk about sustainability. Still, very few really want to take immediate action. Some businesses want to be sustainable but it's not a primary objective for the business and they won't do it if it means they must sacrifice operational or commercial efficiencies. So, they will only really move as and when regulation requires them to. For example, we spoke about automotive at the beginning of the call so that's quite an interesting space right now because, by 2030, every vehicle must be electric. They're massively incentivized by timelines to take action. Whereas other sectors, like construction, can wait until 2050, so there's less sense of urgency. I think for a long time, we probably chased a lot of opportunities where that motivation and regulatory incentivisation wasn't there, and we ended up just wasting time and resources when we should have been focused on supporting businesses operating from a place of morality. Businesses that recognise that this is the right thing to do, first and foremost, because of the environmental ramifications if they do nothing.?

Partnership with Sustainable2

So, the Sustainable2 partnership is one that we're super excited and it's tackling a really important issue. It’s helping businesses take the first initial steps towards understanding where they're at from a sustainability point of view, but then actually laying out an actual actionable plan for them to deliver real impact based on those numbers. For us, this partnership perfectly encapsulates a business operating from a place of good morals as, first and foremost, Sustainable2 want to make positive change. The Sustainable2 team is awesome and super collaborative. We’re working in sync at all times of the day to pull together the different parts of the project, and it's super exciting. The project is more than just Carbon reporting and calculations in the background; it symbolises much more. Transparency and data are directly tied towards a business's ability to be more sustainable and deliver real impact and progress. We want to leverage this partnership to break down barriers and help businesses understand where they are on their journey and take appropriate action accordingly.