Altruistiq Raises £15M Seed to Lead a New Standard in Corporate Carbon Abatement

Altruistiq, a London-based climate SaaS company, has raised £15 million in a seed funding round led by Molten Ventures, with participation from Norrsken and a group of angel investors including Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy founder), Mudassir Sheikha (Careem co-founder), Siraj Khaliq, and Sir Ian Cheshire. The round placed Altruistiq among the top ten best-funded climate software companies globally and one of the largest seed rounds in European tech at the time of closing. The capital will be used to expand the team, deepen the company's data engineering capabilities, and accelerate growth with enterprise clients in the retail, food, FMCG, logistics, and fashion industries.

Altruistiq was founded in 2020 by Saif Hameed, a former associate partner at McKinsey & Company with deep experience in sustainability strategy. Hameed created the company in response to a problem he had observed repeatedly at large organisations: while corporate net zero commitments were proliferating, the data infrastructure underpinning most sustainability programmes was fundamentally inadequate. Most companies relied on high-level estimates and generic emission factors — averages drawn from industry databases — rather than on granular measurement of their actual activities and supply chains. This imprecision not only left companies vulnerable to greenwashing accusations but made genuine emissions reduction difficult to plan and verify.

Altruistiq's platform takes a data engineering approach to corporate sustainability. Rather than asking companies to fill out questionnaires or apply average emission factors, it connects to organisations' existing operational data systems — finance software, procurement platforms, logistics data — and processes that raw operational information to generate granular, traceable emissions calculations at the level of individual products, suppliers, and business activities. This gives companies visibility not just of their total carbon footprint but of precisely where emissions are concentrated, enabling targeted reduction initiatives rather than generic offsets.

Early clients illustrate the platform's impact. Recipe box company Gousto used Altruistiq to decarbonise its supply chain at ingredient level, discovering for example that sourcing tomatoes from Seville rather than the UK carried a lower carbon impact. Other clients include Octopus Energy, Rubix, Meadow Foods, and Lush Cosmetics, drawn primarily from industries with complex, multi-tier supply chains where Scope 3 emissions — those from suppliers and customers — represent the largest share of the total footprint and the hardest to measure accurately.

Altruistiq's thesis is that the carbon accounting market, while growing rapidly, is conflating reporting with abatement. The company argues that companies need not just a number on a screen but an actionable engine that surfaces reduction opportunities and tracks progress against them. This positions Altruistiq in a differentiated space relative to simpler carbon footprint calculators or offset procurement platforms, targeting large enterprises whose decarbonisation journeys are genuinely complex and whose credibility on sustainability is under increasing scrutiny from regulators, investors, and customers.

Sources

• EU Startups — Altruistiq raises €17.6M (July 2022)
• BusinessCloud — Altruistiq raises £15M (July 2022)
• UKTN — Altruistiq closes £15M seed round (July 2022)