CarbonChain is a climate-software company that makes carbon accounting accurate and automatic for the world's most emissions-intensive supply chains, particularly metals, energy, and commodities. Backed by Y Combinator and founded by supply-chain leaders from Rio Tinto, BCG, and Amazon together with carbon experts from Shell, BP, and ERM, CarbonChain addresses a core failing of conventional emissions accounting: it is often based on industry averages and spreadsheets, which are too coarse to drive real decisions or satisfy emerging regulation.
Instead, CarbonChain builds granular, asset-level emissions models. Its database covers more than 11,000 commodity suppliers and the specific assets, smelters, mines, refineries, and routes that produce and move goods, allowing it to estimate the carbon footprint of a particular shipment rather than a generic category. AI and data engineering tie disparate inputs together to produce product and corporate carbon footprints, with the company reporting over one million product carbon footprints delivered.
The platform is increasingly oriented around compliance and financial impact. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) imposes carbon costs on imports of goods like steel, aluminum, and cement, and CarbonChain helps companies generate compliant declarations, having completed hundreds of CBAM filings. Beyond compliance, it lets procurement teams compare suppliers by carbon cost, model emissions-reduction scenarios, and differentiate through verified sustainability, turning carbon from a reporting burden into a competitive and financial lever.
CarbonChain raised a $10 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures and Voyager Ventures. Its methodology is ISO 27001 certified and validated by SGS against the GHG Protocol, underpinning the credibility that regulated and financial customers require. The funding supports expansion of its supplier database, deeper CBAM and trade-compliance features, and integrations with the ERP and commodity-trading systems its customers already run. As carbon pricing and border adjustments spread globally, CarbonChain aims to be the system of record for traded-goods emissions.