Venture Capital/ESG: Stripe And Big Techs Launch $925M Worth Of ‘Advance Market Commitment’ For Carbon Capture Startups

Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey have formed Frontier, the AMC vehicle.
Fintech giant Stripe is joining hands with several tech companies, including Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Meta (NASDAQ: FB) to form Frontier, which will spend nearly $1 billion to assure product offtake from carbon capture startups. Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) and McKinsey are also chipping in. Frontier will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe. (CNBC)
Frontier has drawn up plans to buy $925 million worth of carbon capture output from startups developing the technology.
There is a huge climatic urgency for carbon capture. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, an average of 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed each year from the atmosphere by 2050.
Cumulatively, less than 10,000 tons of CO2 have been removed so far, the gap exemplifying how much remains to be done.
Facebook’s former chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, said in a tweet: “Even the most conservative climate models say we need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Many cool technologies exist but they don’t have a market for their product…”
Stripe also runs a system whereby businesses on its platform can donate a percentage of their revenue to carbon capture. This stream will also funnel into Frontier, and help set up a nascent market for carbon removal ventures.
Earlier this month, carbon removal pioneer Climeworks raised $650 million from top notch investors. It was the largest financing ever for a carbon capture startup.
Climeworks uses renewable energy to scrape carbon from the air and store it underground.
Related Story: Carbon Removal Pioneer Climeworks Raises $650M
Image: CarbonBuilt injected waste CO2 from the coal-fired power plant at Wyoming’s Integrated Test Center into more than 10,000 concrete blocks as part of a successful demonstration project.

Latest Alternative Investment News

Digital Assets: Michael Saylor Unmoved By Crypto Weakness; “We Think It’s The Future Of Money”
Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), who is permanently bullish on bitcoin, reiterated his positive outlook for the leading crypto in an interview on Thursday. Note that MicroStrategy currently…

Digital Assets: Traditional Markets Could Suffer Contagion From (Un)Stablecoins (SEC Chair Gensler)
The crypto world was dealt a body blow by the collapse of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin earlier this month. The Terra meltdown is now being referred as crypto’s “Lehman moment.”…

Venture Capital: Big-Ticket Funding Rounds In Fintechs
Fast-growing, Southeast Asia-focused payments infrastructure platform Xendit closed on a US$300 million Series D funding co-led by Coatue and Insight Partners with additional investment from Accel, Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins,…

FinTech: Sam Bankman-Fried Led FTX.US Makes Inroads Into Stock Trading
FTX Stocks is an equity trading platform offered through the FTX US trading application. FTX US announced Thursday a private beta phase trading on the platform for US customers selected…