London-headquartered Lune, a climate tech startup just announced that it raised has $4 million in funding. The financing round was led by early-stage VC Crane (invested in Virtuoso) along with participation from 15 reputable angel investors, including Maximilian Tayenthal (co-founder of N26), Fredrik Hjelm (co-founder of Voi), and Tony Jamous (co-founder of OysterHR & Nexmo).
Lune will use the proceeds of this financing round to expand its team and build more products to better serve its customers. Currently, the company is hiring across several functions spanning tech, product, commercial, and carbon markets. It intends to make every customer experience climate positive.
Scott Sage, Partner at Crane commented: “Lune’s innovation has come at the right time. There’s never been more interest in climate and sustainability – from consumers and businesses alike. As investors, we’ve seen how every company has become a software company over the past decade. Similarly, we believe that Lune will enable every company to become a climate company.”
Founded by former VC investor!
Currently, across several industries, including payments and banking, it is almost impossible to find any climate-friendly services, despite the increased search among consumers for climate-friendly products. As per Lune, over 70% of European consumers want a “green payment method” that tackles climate change. In the retail space, three in four consumers are more loyal to brands that offset the carbon footprint of a purchase.
In an attempt to address these challenges, a former VC investor at Crane, Erik Stadigh joined hands with Roberto Bruggemann, who was a Principal Engineer at Freetrade, to launch Lune in 2021. The climate tech startup works with the mission to make every product and service climate positive by default.
Erik Stadigh, co-founder of Lune, explained: “We founded Lune to make prioritising climate impact a no-brainer for growth-minded businesses. By integrating it into their customer experience, businesses increase customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty – while having a measurably positive impact on the planet. And with Lune’s API and low/no code tools for emissions calculations and carbon removal, we aim to make it so easy that there’s no excuse not to do it.”
Roberto Bruggemann, Lune’s co-founder said: “An individual payments or software company’s carbon footprint is relatively small. They should put effort into reducing it but, in the grand scheme of things, the impact on fighting climate change will be small. However, by giving all of their customers an easy path to contribute to carbon removal, the positive impact is exponential – and far more effective than going it alone.”
Despite being in the early stages of commercialisation, Lune is already experiencing strong user uptake. Some of its customers include payments and fintech companies TrueLayer and Yapily, retail and logistics firms Apex Rides and Budbee, and global design company IDEO, among others.
Francesco Simoneschi, co-founder & CEO of TrueLayer, explained: “It is essential that every business becomes more climate-friendly. For TrueLayer, doing right for our planet is important, an ethos shared by both our customers and our employees. Lune was the easiest way for our business to take the first steps, have a real impact, and continue building the future of the payments industry.”
What does Lune do?
Usually, it is considered that delivering climate impact initiatives is often seen as expensive and has slowed down the adoption of climate-friendliness among businesses. Lune aims to change this by offering an API and software tools to make it easy for any business to integrate climate impact into their customer experience, starting with carbon emissions calculations and carbon removal. By making it a seamless part of the customer experience, businesses can turn real impact into a growth driver.
Lune partners directly with carbon project developers worldwide to curate a diverse list of high-impact and innovative projects. With its API, a retailer can automatically calculate carbon emissions of a purchase and pay to neutralise it, while transparently allowing consumers to engage in choosing the carbon project. Similarly, payments companies can allow their merchant customers to contribute to removing CO2 from the atmosphere with every transaction.
