In September, greentech startup Zuno Carbon was named the winner of the Startup Arena Pitch Battle organised by Tech in Asia and East Ventures in Singapore.

The competition was looking for a winner that was able to present compelling and innovative solutions that addressed challenges in the environment, social, and governance (ESG) fields. Selected as one of the six finalists, Zuno Carbon was named as a winner after a rigorous process of selection by a panel of industry and panel experts.

Founded in 2020, the Singapore-based company was founded by a team of engineers who believed that being sustainable should be easier.

In an email interview with e27, Zuno Carbon CEO Hari Nair says that the company’s work can be described as “products [that] help organisations measure and reduce their environmental impact.”

It provides end-to-end carbon management solutions for organisations of all sizes that provide unprecedented visibility into their supply chain emissions. The company is working toward enabling ESG teams to shift their focus and resources from merely reporting to actually reducing their environmental impact with the help of AI-generated insights.

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“Calculating one’s carbon footprint is not easy; there are a lot of different data sources and vendors to account for, and doing this manually takes a lot of time and effort,” Nair says.

“Some of our competitors use just financial data (i.e. how much you spend on supplies, materials) in order to estimate the footprint. However, we go beyond that to look at on-the-ground operational data. This allows companies to get a better understanding of where their emissions are coming from, and we use this granular data to show them how they can reduce their emissions as well.”

In developing their solutions, Zuno Carbon prioritised agile and user-centric design practices.

“We have two-week sprints, at the end of which we are able to release an incremental and valuable improvement to the platform. As such, it makes it easy for us to deploy our solutions and take in customer feedback to iterate and fine-tune the product to meet customer needs,” Nair says.

In the future, Zuno Carbon will develop its product further to offer an AI recommendation engine to automate carbon reduction strategies. It will also include a reporting module allowing organisations to report their social, governance, and environmental metrics.

“Thus providing a full ESG reporting solution,” Nair stresses.

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Greentech in Southeast Asia

Around the world, as the climate situation intensifies, there has been greater attention given to companies that can potentially positively impact our fight against climate change. In Southeast Asia (SEA) particularly, discussions about climate tech investments have intensified as companies in the vertical continue to appear.

Things are not always rosy as greentech companies face some unique challenges in the market. “Sometimes sustainability is at the bottom of a company’s priority list, especially for SMEs and large local companies,” Nair points out.

But this does not mean the region has no future for green tech.

“SEA is a hub for manufacturing, energy, and all sorts of industrial activity. As such, there is also a significant amount of emissions in the region. Governments and regulatory authorities have already begun imposing restrictions and reporting requirements on companies in this sector, and as the nature of activities vary from region to region, it is important that we cater to the local ecosystem,” Nair says.

“We aim to capture the market for carbon management in ASEAN across the energy, manufacturing, real estate, and logistics segments.”

In acquiring potential users, Zuno Carbon offers flexible subscription plans and workshops to help companies take stock of their sustainability efforts and see how its product can help them in this journey to bring them on board.

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Most of their clients are larger companies with complex supply chains that want to change how they affect the world around them.

Zuno Carbon raised a pre-seed funding round earlier this year, and it is aiming to raise a seed funding round in the next three to four months or the end of 2022.

Next year, it plans to expand further into the region and release its AI recommendation engine to truly power decarbonisation for SMEs and MNCs.

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Image Credit: Zuno Carbon

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