#033 Why we invested in Olive Gaea

With global warming coming to the forefront for world economies together, the onus to curtailing the carbon emissions lies with the largest contributors – the enterprises. Industry policies and regulations are tightening, to face the challenges of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases emitted by these enterprises. With businesses also becoming aware of these activities and wanting to address the same, sustainable and scalable solutions that can cater meaningful change are the need of the hour. As per McKinsey, spending on physical assets and solutions on the course to net-zero would reach about US$275 trillion by 2050.

As per EU’s Database for Global Atmospheric Research, the total GHG emissions for 2022 stood 53.8 Gt CO2eq, for context a gigatonne is equivalent to 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers At Cornerstone, innovation, with a scalable and sustainable business models are pillars of our investment thesis in the next generation tech ventures and our latest investment  fits right in. Olive Gaea’s core product – Net Zero Platform, is a full-scale carbon management solution to measure, monitor, reduce and offset greenhouse gas emissions to bridge the climate gap. With a first mover advantage in the Middle East, its growing client base in India and the founder’s fiery passion to cater this solution at scale, Olive Gaea became a natural choice for us with its shared vision. They are working with some prominent names across both India and Dubai like The Sharjah International Airport, Shobha Realty, ITC Hotel Group, Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation and many more.

End to end decarbonization platform:

What’s exciting about Olive Gaea, is its competence to cater its client in the entire journey of decarbonizing. With its SaaS solution, Olive Gaea brings efficiency and precision for its clients allowing them to address every stage of the process via a centralized hub. The first step of reducing emissions is measuring and monitoring these emissions. The platform measures and assess carbon footprints across the organization (Scope I, II and III) in an automated way, providing real-time insights into ongoing emissions. Next, the platform also facilitates tailored recommendations and reduction strategies to effectively minimize these carbon footprints. While reduction strategies aim to minimize emissions, some emissions may be unavoidable. The platform goes a step further, and also provides options for investing in carbon offset projects and purchasing carbon credits.

Olive Gaea is not limited to just businesses but extends to the consumers of these businesses too. Businesses can offer their consumers an alternative to offset carbon footprints associated with their purchases made, in just a single click. With this, consumers can now have transparent insights into the environmental impact of their purchases and can accordingly make a decision to offset it. This gives businesses to engage their consumers towards sustainability.

Automated monitoring & Intelligent Reduction Strategies:

What we loved about Olive Gaea is that it takes the manual and cumbersome  task of calculating carbon footprints and makes it an automated data-driven activity, taking subjective inputs out of the picture. Its ability to compute carbon footprints across segments capturing granular details of the source is what makes the platform impactful. The platform breaks down the sources and origins of such footprints and provides a holistic view of emissions across all three Scopes. The detailed approach helps business to identify and address the root cause while forming a decarbonization strategy.

The tailored  recommendations are based on the business activity and its identified sources of emissions. These recommendations are very specific to industries, operational nuances, and feasible interventions, ensuring that the proposed strategies align with the company's capabilities and objectives.

Adaptable and Scalable Model:

Olive Gaea’s platform has the ability to expand and adapt its functionalities to cater to businesses across scale and industries. This is what makes the platform so agile and a firm solution for growing enterprises ensuring that it remains a valuable and effective tool in their ongoing pursuit of sustainability and achieve their net-zero goals. Olive Gaea currently serves clients in industries like Travel & Hospitality, BFSI, Govt Organizations, Real Estate, Manufacturing and more. As the platform scales, it has enhanced it’s focus on the BFSI segment, since they are a key stakeholder driving and fuelling many industries and can hold their borrowers accountable for their emissions.  As for us, we love seeing such adaptable solutions which can be served to businesses globally and at every scale.

Founder’s Commitment:

The company is working with some of the prominent names across India and Dubai. Vivek’s 15+ years of experience across industries and major conglomerates and Jessica’s previous experience driving sustainability for some of the big corporations globally makes the team strong enough to execute and scale Olive Gaea from here on.

As I write this piece, I am thrilled to share that Olive Gaea has been recognized as one of 50 most innovative companies in the MENA Region by PwC in its 2023 State of Climate Tech: PwC Net Zero Future50 - Middle East. We’re delighted to support Vivek & Jessica in their journey to drive sustainability and achieve net zero target!

~ Sona

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