Interesting read in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/stripe-c…
Stripe is one of those technology companies that control the internet’s plumbing. It makes payments-processing software that hustles money from your debit or credit card to someone else’s bank account. If you’ve ever purchased groceries on Instacart or supported a project on Kickstarter, you’ve used Stripe.
Stripe is worth $36 billion by one metric, making it among the most valuable U.S. start-ups that have yet to go public. Only a handful of firms, such as SpaceX and Cargill, are more valuable.
In the past year, Stripe has become one of the world’s largest purchasers of carbon-removal credits, devoting $1 million to extracting carbon from the sky. Last month, it began allowing its customers—the businesses that use its payment software—to buy carbon removal as well.
Today, Stripe buys removal from four companies: Climeworks, which captures carbon directly from the air and injects it into underground basalt; CarbonCure, which injects carbon into concrete; Project Vesta, which uses a common mineral to convert carbon in the ocean into limestone on the seafloor; and Charm Industrial, which produces an oil from biomass and then injects it deep into the earth.
Peter Reinhardt, the chief executive of Charm Industrial, one of Stripe’s carbon-removal clients, told me. Right now it costs $600 to sequester a ton of carbon using Charm’s technique, but it won’t become a competitive product in carbon markets until that cost is down to about $200 a ton. “By the time we deliver on our contracts with Stripe and others, we’ll be down the cost curve by 10 percent,” Reinhardt said.
“When investors go to decide whether they’re going to give any of these companies money, they’re going to ask, Is there a customer?” Ransohoff said. “Right now, in carbon removal, the answer is mostly no.” So Stripe’s job is to be the buyer of first resort: the “demand-side signal” that a market exists for carbon removal.
Stripe climate’s site (want you to login): https://stripe.com/climate
https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/climate-launch
Stripe’s enterprise customer momentum has continued of late, with recent partnerships including Atlassian, Instagram, Lightspeed, Maersk, Twilio, Zoom Video Communications, and Salesforce. As the only payments platform serving Fortune 500 companies alongside brand new startups, Stripe makes it easy for any internet company to start and scale their business—and now to use Stripe’s sophisticated payment tools to take meaningful climate action as well.