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Bend — 1 click carbon accounting for startups
We help startups measure their carbon emissions by connecting to your company bank account (Brex, Mercury, AmEx, etc.), and then estimating the impact of each purchase. Plus API access for developers.
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Love to see this. It's one thing to get companies to recognize the value of measuring their carbon emissions, but making it as easy as possible will go just as far if not farther in making carbon accounting a common practice.
@lankybutmacho Exactly. Regulatory requirements are still just beginning to roll out across the world, and in the meantime the best way we can prepare the market is to make carbon accounting as simple and *affordable* as possible. Bend is literally 100x less expensive than most of the popular carbon accounting products out there today (though of course they are aimed at larger enterprises)
Congrats Ted and Thomas! This looks pretty awesome - carbon emissions tracking down to the transaction level sounds like a major win for companies prioritizing climate impact. I'm curious, you mentioned "scalable carbon accounting" - does the end product of Bend (for companies that are Net Zero) look like a QuickBooks/Xero system of double entry accounting for carbon emissions, where a company would "close the books" on their carbon emissions?
@navisadas That's definitely a great way of thinking about it! If you opt into our Offsets Plan, we bill an extra monthly charge to offset your emissions for the previous month, with a highly credible blend of US-based forest-preservation and true carbon removal.
We'll also be integrating this feature more with commitment planning in the future, so that companies can make a net-zero commitment and ramp towards it if they're already facing a steep "carbon bill."
What a great idea and great implementation. Especially in a world where sustainability is a most pressing topic.
@tedp you mentioned in the brief about your background and how this all started, may I suggest adding a About Us page on the website with your profiles and the story behind Bend. It would go a long way to building trust.
Looks amazing both!
How's your foreign currency (£) support? Would love to give this a try if you support non-US banks
@beau_allison Depending on the bank we can cover you either through our Plaid integration or with CSV upload—a bit more manual but it gets the job done!
@mattz Great question! As far as we know, we're the only spend-based carbon accounting tool with *merchant-specific factors*—we fall back to categories for complete coverage, but we have a long and growing list of businesses for which we calculate a more accurate carbon intensity unique to that vendor.
This sounds really interesting! Can I get a walkthrough example of what happens for a particular transaction? Let's say my startup pays for Azure DevOps, for example. When we pay our monthly bill, what information might we get from Bend for that transaction?
@darren_caulley So, today, we would take a transaction from "Azure DevOps" and do a merchant lookup in our database—likely getting us to "Microsoft Azure." "Microsoft Azure" is what we'd consider a subsidiary merchant, or department of Microsoft, a public company for which we've aggregated sustainability data. Today, we don't have an Azure specific-factor, so we'd roll up to the carbon intensity for Microsoft, and tell you the estimated CO2e emissions for that purchase as a function of Microsoft's total revenue and total emissions.
In the future, we plan to support "weighting" specific subsidiaries, such that a purchase with Azure would be less carbon-intense than a purchase of an Xbox, for example (or at least, that's my guess :))
Hey! product looks great! You mention that the methodology that you follow for category fallbacks is approved by scientists and other experts. Could you better explain what you mean by this? Thanks!
Just wanted to jump into the thread and say hello myself :) Where my fellow night-owls/disregulated-sleep-schedules at tonight?
Ted and I have been working HARD on this all year, but we kicked it into high gear when we got into Y Combinator, and I could not be prouder of what we're launching with today. Definitely watch the demo video Ted recorded—you'll be shocked how easy (and affordable) it is to start measuring and offsetting your corporate carbon footprint!
Oh, and we're based in New York! 🗽 Excelsior!
Really amazing to read about the vision here! What types of carbon offsets does Patch support?
@charlotte_moore4 Patch has hundreds of different offerings, but for our integration we selected a blend between two highly credible projects, one a relatively low-cost US-based forest preservation project, and the other a high-cost carbon removal project (through Charm Industrial). The reason we do this is to funnel investment into carbon removal, which is obviously the gold standard for carbon 'offsetting' since it's actually pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere! The math works out to $100 per tCO2e for the blend :)
Bend