Why we invested in Kwota
Pablo Picasso — ‘Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.’
The primary reason why we invested in Kwota is the strong founder team of Rain Vääna and Argo Rannamets. They learned about recycling industry’s players, logistics and business models serving in various C-level positions over a decade at Ragn-Sells, a Swedish waste management and recycling giant.
Now Rain and Argo are ready to disrupt the recycling industry by launching Kwota — platform for minting, verifying, and selling carbon credits. Kwota CO₂ credits are unique — unlike most CO₂ credits that are based on forestry or agricultural land management, these are based on emissions savings from expanding recycling of paper, plastics, glass and other materials..
Kwota is re-writing the rules in the carbon credits market in a couple of key ways.
First — Kwota flips the economics of CO₂ credits from 20%-80% in favor of consultants to 80–20% in favor of carbon reducers By combining supplier, recycler and government reporting data with IOT monitoring solutions and web 3.0 ledger technologies, Kwota is able to both dramatically reduce costs as well as increase trust by bringing full transparency to the recycling process.
Second — Kwota revamps the economics of recycling in favor of reusing more existing materials. Currently over 50% of total carbon emissions are caused by materials production and only 8,6% of more than 100 billion tons of materials produced is reused. Most companies hesitate to use recycled materials because manufacturing from virgin materials is cheaper and less cumbersome than using recycled materials. By sharing proceeds from the CO₂ credit sales with the market participants, economics of recycling is turned in favor of circular economy companies. Moreover, through pre-sales, recycling facilities can finance expansion of facilities to further increase their recycling capacity.
For us Kwota combines the best of both worlds — massive positive environmental impact and sizable economic opportunity, as the total voluntary carbon trading market is expected by McKinsey, Bank of America and other analysts to grow 30X by 2050.
We are joined in this round by excellent co-investors: LemonadeStand, Startup Wise Guys Venture Fund 2, Greenco Ventures, Vestman Energy and Janis Krums.
Yrjö Ojasaar, Investment Partner.
