senken raised 7,5M, led by Obvious Ventures

Together we to continue to make climate finance more transparent and accessible.

5 min readJan 27, 2023

We are excited to announce that senken recently raised $7.5 million in capital. The round was led by Obvious Ventures with significant participation from Offline Ventures, Inflection and Kraken Ventures, along with other existing investors including Climate Capital. This investment strengthens senken for the foreseeable future to continue to make climate finance more transparent and accessible.

Since the foundation of senken in 2021, we have worked tirelessly to create a marketplace that allows companies and investors to easily purchase, trade and offset carbon credits. The platform now offers the widest selection of climate assets (+20 million carbon credits) and ensures the quality and integrity of the projects by adding data layers containing project information (such as vintage, credit type, additionality), carbon ratings, pricing, and MRV data.

We just launched the worlds’ first public sale of carbon forward tokens , enabling pre-funding of blue carbon in collaboration with Vlinder.

We are beyond excited to be at the forefront of this innovative market, keep your eyes on our channels as we introduce carbon forwards to the world.

The challenges of the carbon markets

Currently the carbon markets are fragmented and opaque. Impact leaders looking to fight climate change have limited access to climate projects and risk greenwashing accusations. Combine this with the absence of price discovery, corporations have unknowingly paid exorbitant prices in search of quality; sometimes as much as an increase of 20 to 400%! This means that the opaqueness of the OTC market reduces the ability to scale the market.

At senken we believe we can have the biggest impact as a company on fighting climate change, by creating transparent carbon markets. By providing orientation and clarity we aim to enable sustainability leaders to make the right decisions to reach their net zero ambitions. We are determined to surface quality by providing transparency.

Our investors

When we started out to raise capital, we looked for advisers who aligned with our vision and our cultural values. We were immediately attracted to Andrew from Obvious ventures, a highly respected originator of the climate space. Obvious Ventures is a world positive venture capital firm founded by purpose-driven founders, previously involved in companies like Twitter and Patagonia. The firm helps entrepreneurs who are set to decarbonize the global economy and have invested in a number of successful companies, including Beyond Meat and Sinai. “Andrew is the OG in the space. From day one Obvious, especially Andrew & Arek, impressed us by their deep knowledge of the space and the support in the first days. We are extremely excited to have Andrew on the board as well,” Adrian, co-founder senken said.

“In order to power a future global economy that is more efficient and carbon-free, we need new frameworks and solutions to help finance the massive changes that are required, Adrian and the team have created a powerful new model for carbon investment in a short period of time and we are proud to lead this investment round.” — Andrew Beebe, managing director, Obvious Ventures.

Co-leading the investment round is Offline Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. The firm, very notably, counts Apple as an anchor investor. We are fortunate to have Nate Bosshard as an advisor who has a strong expertise in branding, positioning and marketing strategy.

Another great addition to the funding round is Inflection VC, a highly respected firm in the web3 space. Inflection creates a massive value add as a tech and ecosystem partner by leveraging their extensive network, industry knowledge and operational experiences on blockchain technology. The firm has a diversified portfolio and expertise, investments include Balancer and Centrifuge. We are delighted to welcome Alex to our advisory board who supports us with his diverse knowledge in the space.

“senken is uniquely positioned to establish global carbon markets at minimised cost and with highest transparency standards. The firm leverages crypto technologies allowing market participants to verify a project’s quality and any carbon asset’s chain of ownership. Through Defi legos senken unlocks a universe of carbon products like forward futures or insurance contracts which can be composed and interacted with programmatically while sharing a public source of truth. At Inflection we couldn’t be more excited about the symbiosis of climate and crypto technologies.” — Alexander Lange, managing director Inflection.

Lastly, we are honored to be backed by Kraken Ventures, associated with the global crypto platform Kraken. The independent venture fund supports early stage companies that power the next wave of innovation at the intersection of crypto and fintech. They will support senken with their deep crypto expertise and experience in making new markets

“There’s many similarities between the early days of crypto and the state of play in the voluntary carbon market. Credits vary hugely in quality and markets are opaque. We believe blockchain, by providing additional transparency, traceability and liquidity, will be the best technology stack for carbon credits to live on. With many different players moving fast on bridging credits on-chain, senken is tapping into a gigantic market opportunity by launching a marketplace that abstracts all complexity away and makes it easy for companies & traders to buy and trade these carbon credits” — Laurens De Poorter, Head of Europe at Kraken Ventures.

We are confident we can help save our planet by making nature fundable. With this round we aim to make senken the world’s largest and most transparent climate market. Keep your eyes on our channels for updates around our new financial instrument carbon forwards!

About senken

senken is an easy-to-use platform to access the largest selection of climate assets for transparent climate action and finance. With senken, we want to make it easier for companies and investors to support regenerative climate projects by buying verified carbon credits. senken provides additional security and transparency at the data level to ensure the quality and integrity of each project.

Confidently purchase trade and retire carbon credits to reach your companies’ net-zero ambitions.