Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

Hi HN! We’re Ted and Thomas from Bend (https://bend.green/product). We help companies measure their carbon emissions by connecting to your corporate bank account (Brex, Mercury, or any other financial institution on Plaid) and then estimating the impact of each purchase.

Thomas and I found our way to this project via our background in fintech. Prior to Bend, I was a co-founder of Abacus (YC W14), a spend management company. At Abacus, we noticed that finance teams are increasingly paying attention to the climate impact of their purchase decisions, from travel policies, to cloud hosting, and beyond.

We believe this 'spend based' approach is the key to unlocking scalable carbon accounting. Today, most carbon accounting is manual, conducted once a year, and takes weeks or months to complete. It's like doing your taxes.

Fortunately, in the last couple years, we’ve started to reach a critical mass of good merchant data. It used to be that only a handful of companies tracked and disclosed their emissions. Today, 70%+ of Fortune 500 companies disclose their emissions in annual sustainability reports, and 1/3 of the entire global economy is now covered by a Science Based Target (and this coverage and quality is accelerating). The spend-based approach is fully automated and starts working the moment you connect your bank account.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this emissions data is trapped in PDFs and blog posts, scattered across the internet. We aggregate and normalize this data by hand today, and plan to automate the process in the future.

Here’s how we measure the tCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) of your transactions: imagine that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent with Atlassian, there’s a 30.2 kg footprint — we multiply your bill total * (Atlassian’s annual emissions / Atlassian’s annual revenue) and return the tCO2e of that transaction.

Now imagine a similar calculation for each of the thousands of purchases your company makes every month / quarter / year. For merchants that don’t yet publish their emissions data, we fall back to category averages (e.g. for a Starbucks, we use the specific Starbucks carbon intensity factor, but for a mom-and-pop coffee shop that doesn’t disclose their greenhouse gas info, we use a generic benchmark ‘coffee shop’ factor).

To get a feel for the data we track, click on some of the corporate logos on https://bend.green/ — these aren’t customers; they’re examples of Bend’s merchant data. We have a climate scientist PhD on the team named Marion — we’d be happy to answer questions about our methodology!

Measuring and reducing your company’s emissions is of course good for the planet, but it also prepares your company for upcoming regulations and investor requirements. We help you create a 'climate profile' that you can use to close sales as the sustainable alternative to your competitors (you can share your info with prospects, customers, employees, investors, etc. — think of it like the climate equivalent of becoming SOC 2 compliant). And we just rolled out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions (optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing).

Our pricing is $100 / month per company, and your company can try Bend for free for 14 days: https://app.bend.green/sign-up

Bonus points: if you’re building a fintech app, Bend data is also available via API (email us for API keys and docs). And if you work at a large / public company that already measures emissions, we encourage you to claim your company profile on Bend (for free!), and ask your vendors to track their emissions (after all, your vendors’ emissions become your emissions).

We’d love to hear your feedback and we’re excited to answer any questions!

Ya good point — our approach is always spend-based, so the way we'd calculate cloud spend is your AWS / GCP bill * the AWS / Google carbon intensity (what we call a 'factor'). It is true that some data center regions use cleaner energy vs. others. We consider the spend-based approach, at a minimum, a good first pass. The greener the cloud you use, the lower the emissions. And then you can further optimize within your cloud provider.

Another note — most cloud emissions only factor in the energy footprint ('scope 2' in technical greenhouse gas inventory terms). We believe this significantly undercounts emissions, because it ignores the capital expenditure of building the facility, buying all the machines, etc. The great thing about the spend-based approach is all this overhead is factored in. (BTW, Google Cloud Platform just started to layer in some of this 'scope 3' operational overhead data, but I believe AWS still ignores it, significantly undercounting emissions).

I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy.

If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employees, it spends on infra and then finally on actual energy. Saved money is never accessed if parked. What it gives to other companies and people will spawn the same split we created when we paid google ad infinitum. Money spent on infra can have an outsized environmental impact (plastic, concrete) but I’m hoping we can ignore it, and the Final expenditure is pure energy.

I feel like if you keep breaking down every Avenue parts of your 100 bucks goes into, it’ll eventually go to creating energy more or less. Even if you choose google because they use green energy, the employees who are paid by google will use amazon powered Netflix so it might not matter any more than what’s the fraction of green energy in the total economy.

Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money! But no one wants that do they? They just want to have their cake and also eat it so we are just doomed.

Been outlining this for an article for a while, comments , prior research and criticism appreciated! https://www.ramrajv.com/blog/how-to-truly-reduce-your-carbon...

Yes, green-washing is definitely a problem. There is an incredibly wide variance of quality among carbon offsets, from dubious avoidance offsets priced at $2 per ton of CO2-equivalent emissions (tCo2e) to actually sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it below the earth for $600-1000 per tCo2e.

At Bend, we are trying to really apply pressure on the market to be real about going "net-zero." Our offsets package is priced at $100 per ton, which is still surprisingly affordable for a lot of small companies. We blend that package across reforestation projects (low-cost) and true carbon removal project (high-cost) to offset a company's emissions, in order to funnel investment towards those more expensive operations. This is important so that companies like Charm Industrial and Climeworks can increase their efficiency and bring the price-point of carbon removal down.

And while $100/tCo2e might sound expensive, our thesis is that it's still remarkably affordable, especially for small companies who factor it in early on. This program is also opt-in, so you can start out with Bend just to measure your emissions and then decide about offsetting later... but for us, for example, our "Carbon Bill" hovers between just $25 to a $100 per month. Barely doubles the cost of the base subscription!

Anyone can translate carbon footprint into trees or whatever. The important part is having a metric so you can make sure it's going down, not up.