Wren, A Y Combinator Carbon Offset Startup, Raises $1.5M From Union Square Ventures And Paul Graham To Empower Individuals Building A Greener Planet

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Climate change has been a major foreboding issue of the last decade. CNN articles lecture individuals on daily actions they can take to cut down on their carbon footprint. However, The Guardian's viral piece depicting how just 100 companies are responsible for over 70% of all global emissions reflects their view on who's to blame for the predicament humanity now faces. Regardless of whom one chooses to blame, people across the world want solutions to the climate problems we collectively face. Within the U.S., Landon Brand, 22, Ben Stanfield, 22, and Mimi Tran Zambetti, 20, saw the anxiety among their fellow citizens and started Wren to channel that nervous energy into productive action. Wren is a carbon offset startup that asks users a series of questions to calculate their carbon footprint and fund projects that produce an equivalent reduction in greenhouse gases. The San Francisco-based startup has recently raised a $1.5m seed round from led by Union Square Ventures (USV), with participation from Y Combinator (YC) cofounder Paul Graham and various angels.

USV's Albert Wenger, the firm’s investor in the round, stated that Wren fits well into the firm's philosophy surrounding the technologies they support. "Our current investment thesis is about broadening access to knowledge, capital and wellbeing. The climate crisis is a direct threat to all of that. Wren allows individuals to respond with immediate, meaningful action and does so in a way that brings trust and transparency to carbon offsets," Wenger says.

Trust, transparency, and collective initiative surrounding climate change is the foundation of the global carbon market. McKinsey & Company, one of the big three prestigious management consulting firms, estimates that the global carbon market to be nearly $891 billion in 2020. Viewing the carbon market on a regional level reveals a lucrative beachhead market for startups in the space. Within California alone, the state's carbon cap-and-trade market's size was $6.5 billion in 2017. The market's transaction volume only accounted for trades between corporations and the state of California. One could assume the market could even be more substantial if consumers had access to a marketplace via subscriptions to offset their carbon footprint.

Gustaf Alstr?mer is a YC partner who worked closely with Wren during their time in the startup accelerator. He says, "It's clear to me that we need a great consumer experience for individuals who want to remove their annual carbon emissions. Wren is that service. Something I learned from the Wren team is that the people that choose to use their service overlaps with people who are also lowering their emissions in their lives."

Wren has built a subscription service that allows users to pay a monthly fee based on their calculated carbon footprint. The payment goes to funding projects around that world that would generate a corresponding reduction of their emissions. Some of these projects include community tree planting, Amazon rainforest protection and providing clean cooking fuel for refugees. More importantly, the startup delivers transparency about the day-to-day operations of these critical, green initiatives to their users. The trust generated by this transparency is keeping the startup's subscribers' faith that their money is going towards great climate causes. The startup's user retention is magnetic. They are even attracting corporations who want to have carbon offsetting as a perk for their employees. (If only there was a fruitful startup that offered such a marketplace for perks like Wren.)

Dani Grant, an analyst at USV, played a crucial role in the New York City-based firm leading the startup's fundraising round. Her comments perfectly capture the urge of corporations and their employees wanting to lower their emissions professionally. She says, "We first came across Wren when we were in the process of offsetting the firm's travel. We were surprised at how confusing and opaque buying carbon offsets seemed to be, and we found buying through Wren to be the most transparent and trusted way for us to offset our footprint. Many of the other carbon offsetting marketplaces we spoke to couldn't give us financial clarity. They couldn't tell us how much each dollar we paid them would make it to the offsetting project or what impact those dollars were having. Wren, however, gave us full transparency. That's why we backed the Wren team."

At first glance, the team behind Wren looks like your everyday millennial college students. The three cofounders met at the University of Southern California. Brand found his passion for coding in high school and attended USC to build software. Stanfield, who was Brand's roommate at USC, had an eye for design. The two worked on various class projects together, figuring they would make excellent partners if they started a company with each other. Completing the trio is Zambetti, who was born in Vietnam and still attends USC. She arrived at the South Los Angeles campus with a vision for building physical products, but developed an affinity for software and its fast iterative development process. Her blossoming interest in software development drove her to create a USC campus chatbot that provided answers to questions about dining hall menus. She also organized an all-women Makeathon at USC. Each is individually talented and driven, but together, they make a formidable trio.

However, with closer scrutiny, Alstr?mer finds these three to be a "consumer internet specialist team." He's not the only one who thinks highly of the founding trio.

Graham says, "What I like about Wren is that they give individuals a way to take action beyond just cutting down their carbon footprint. If you combine that idea with startup-type growth rates, you end up with a world in which many people are doing this."

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