Climate tech company Lune has raised £3 million in funding.
Based in London, its API and software tools claim to make it easy for any business to integrate climate impact into their customer experience – starting with carbon emissions calculations and carbon removal.
The funding round was led by early-stage VC Crane, with participation from 15 reputable angel investors, including Maximilian Tayenthal (co-founder of N26), Fredrik Hjelm (co-founder of Voi) and Tony Jamous (co-founder of OysterHR & Nexmo).
The firm says that in many industries today, such as payments and banking, it is almost impossible to find any climate-friendly services – despite consumers actively searching for visibly climate-friendly products.
To address these challenges, Erik Stadigh, formerly a VC investor at Crane, and Roberto Bruggemann, most recently a principal engineer at Freetrade, co-founded Lune on a mission to make every product and service climate positive by default.
“The status quo today is to create a Sustainability Report, which will be buried somewhere on a company’s website – far away from the eyes of most customers,” said Stadigh.
“As such, the business never sees any commercial return in this area. Sustainability remains a cost centre and struggles to compete with revenue-generating initiatives.
“We founded Lune to make prioritising climate impact a no-brainer for growth-minded businesses. By integrating it into their customer experience, businesses increase customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty – while having a measurably positive impact on the planet.
“And with Lune’s API and low/no code tools for emissions calculations and carbon removal, we aim to make it so easy that there’s no excuse not to do it.”
Lune partners directly with carbon project developers across the world to curate a diverse list of high-impact and innovative projects. With Lune’s API, a retailer can automatically calculate carbon emissions of a purchase and pay to neutralise it, while transparently allowing consumers to engage in the choice of carbon project.
In a similar manner, payments companies can allow their merchant customers to contribute to removing CO2 from the atmosphere with every transaction.
Lune is still in the early stages of commercialisation but says it is already experiencing strong user uptake. Lune’s customers include payments and FinTech companies TrueLayer and Yapily, retail and logistics firms Apex Rides and Budbee, and global design company IDEO.
Francesco Simoneschi, co-founder and CEO of TrueLayer, explained: “It is essential that every business becomes more climate friendly. For TrueLayer, doing right for our planet is important, an ethos shared by both our customers and our employees.
“Lune was the easiest way for our business to take the first steps, have a real impact, and continue building the future of the payments industry.”