Supercritical Raises £2M to Build the First Carbon Removal Marketplace for Businesses
December 18, 2024
Supercritical, a London-based startup building a marketplace for carbon removal offsets, has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding led by LocalGlobe. The round also includes backing from a group of prominent angel investors including Taavet Hinrikus (Wise), Alice Bentinck (Entrepreneur First), Peter Reinhardt (Twilio Segment and Charm Industrial), Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter), Amit Gudka (Bulb), Frank Strauss (Deutsche Bank), and Evelyn Bourke (Bupa). The capital will be used to scale the platform and accelerate Supercritical's mission to make meaningful climate action accessible for businesses of all sizes.
Supercritical was founded in 2021 by Michelle You and Aaron Randall, who previously worked together at Songkick, the music ticketing company that was sold to Warner Music Group. You had co-founded Songkick alongside Ian Hogarth on a Y Combinator programme, and the team's experience building a marketplace at scale informed their approach to the carbon removal problem. Randall served as Songkick's CTO.
The platform addresses a specific and critical gap in corporate sustainability: the difference between conventional carbon offsets and genuine carbon removal. Most traditional offsets simply pay others not to emit, meaning a company's carbon remains in the atmosphere. Supercritical exclusively offers carbon removal — technologies and natural processes that actively extract CO₂ from the air, including biochar, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, bio-oil sequestration, and afforestation. The company's consumer-grade software guides businesses through measuring their emissions, creating a reduction plan, and building a portfolio of vetted removal credits.
The voluntary carbon removal market is still nascent but is projected to grow dramatically as corporate net zero commitments translate into procurement. The IPCC estimates that at least 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will need to be removed annually by 2050 to stay within 1.5°C of warming. Supercritical is positioning itself as a market maker — aggregating demand from corporate buyers and channelling it to removal projects that need capital to scale. Its early clients include accuRx, Faculty, Tide, and what3words, predominantly drawn from the tech sector, which carries a larger carbon footprint than the entire aviation industry.
The pre-seed funding will support team growth and accelerate Supercritical's ability to onboard new businesses, build out its vetting and procurement infrastructure, and develop the aggregated purchasing models that give smaller CDR projects the revenue certainty they need to grow. Remus Brett of LocalGlobe described the raise as support for the only platform focused specifically on carbon removal rather than conventional offsets at a moment when the question of how businesses could meaningfully address their climate impact had become a priority at the CEO level.
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