Venture fund TA Ventures and the private investors club ICLUB invested in the US startup Aerial, a tool for tracking and offsetting your carbon footprint.
Aerial closed a $2M seed funding round with participation from Global Founders Capital, Lachy Groom, Canaan, Climate Capital, Great Oaks VC, Fourth Realm VC, Whalebone Ventures, Derek Dolin, and Paul Veugen.
What is Aerial
Aerial is a startup that allows people to offset the carbon emissions produced primarily by their travel. Aerial founders shed light on the environmental impact of each one of us.
“We know things like flying, driving, and home energy produce a carbon footprint and drive demand for fossil fuels. But we do not know how much, how to track it, and what to do about it.”
Aerial gives an opportunity to live sustainably for the price of Netflix. A user just connects their email history to Aerial, so the app can sift through their emails to find taxi rides and flights. After that, it calculates emissions and proposes to compensate it with payment to environmental organizations that are restoring more carbon to the earth through practices such as forest conservation.
TA Ventures partner Oleg Malenkov explains the fund’s rationale for this deal, “Think of it as a mindfulness phenomenon which Calm and others started 10 years ago. Sustainable living is the next big movement people follow to save our planet. Aerial is definitely a long shot for TA Ventures, and even though they’re catching the momentum with NFTs right now, we believe there’s so much value underneath to capture in the long run. Why wouldn’t people pay monthly to offset their emissions? They would, if not today, then tomorrow.”
Recently Aerial launched a subscription model. Further, it can see how its footprint stacks up against the average user and learn from scientific articles about ways to improve.
NFT carbon footprint tracker
The latest feature from the Aerial team is a footprint tracker for NFT (non-fungible-tokens). New blocks of information for blockchain are “mined,” which requires expensive computer hardware that consumes a lot of power and produces a lot of waste. The Aerial online tool allows users to calculate the carbon footprint of their NFT collection and instantly offset the emissions through verified carbon offset and carbon capture programs.
Several celebrities, including Calvin Harris and street artist Mr. Brainwash, have already used Aerial’s online tool to offset their own NFTs.
