Making Climate Action Accessible

In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, we dive into the journey of Onur Elgun, founder of CarbonSifr, a startup transforming climate action by leveraging technology to make sustainability more accessible. This edition takes a product-focused approach, shedding light on how CarbonSifr is able to simplify and accelerate climate action.

Making Climate Action Accessible 

Onur’s journey to founding CarbonSifr is deeply intertwined with his experiences in the Middle East. Having moved to the region in 2007 and spending time at BCG before joining Talabat as VP of Strategy in 2019, he played a pivotal role in transforming the platform from a simple restaurant marketplace to a multi-vertical app for food and groceries. This transformation, driven by making services more accessible and convenient, became a cornerstone of Onur’s philosophy.

“For anyone or any business to take climate action, it has to be convenient and linked to their core business objectives,” Onur emphasizes. Inspired by this principle, CarbonSifr was born with the mission to make climate action accessible and impactful for businesses in the MENA region and beyond. 

Derived from the Arabic word “Sifr,” meaning zero, the name CarbonSifr reflects the company’s ultimate vision: driving carbon emissions down to zero. This ethos sits at the heart of the company’s mission and values. At its core, CarbonSifr helps businesses measure, reduce, and manage their carbon emissions in coordination with their key stakeholders like suppliers, banks, and government entities. 

Measuring Carbon Emissions

Measuring carbon emissions is a data-intensive process that requires collecting and processing large volumes of information from various sources. According to Onur, a mid-to-large company with annual revenue between $2 million and $10 million can generate over 15 million data points related to its emissions. These data points stem from a variety of business activities, including the goods and services purchased, energy usage, employee travel, and other operational activities. Traditionally, this measurement process is old-fashioned and manual, involving Excel sheets and data collection from multiple business units, ranging from utility bills to travel records.

However, CarbonSifr’s Llama-powered platform (Meta’s large language model) eliminates the friction in this process. Rather than dealing with cumbersome templates and fragmented data collection, businesses can easily upload their data in any form—be it a utility bill in PDF format or a large data set in an Excel sheet. The platform can even integrate directly with ERP systems for a seamless experience. 

The magic behind this solution lies in the platform's AI engine, which reads, cleans, and maps data to emission factors. This calculation engine is sector-agnostic, meaning it can be applied across various industries without requiring customization, making it a versatile solution for businesses in any field. The automatic processing and calculation of emissions measurements result in a streamlined, efficient approach to carbon accounting, eliminating complexity and enabling businesses to quickly understand and track their carbon footprint all the way down to their supply chain. While the AI handles most of the process, climate scientists provide oversight to ensure data quality, performing checks for anomalies and verifying accuracy. Additionally, CarbonSifr adheres to the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, the globally recognized standard for carbon accounting, ensuring reliable and comprehensive emissions reporting.

Fun Fact: At the time of writing, CarbonSifr is the only climate tech company mentioned on Llama's website.

Filling Data Gaps

A significant challenge in carbon emissions measurement, especially in Scope 3 emissions, is dealing with gaps in procurement data, which can often lack key details such as the country of origin. For example, in procurement records, you might see a generic item like "blueberries" listed without knowing whether they came from the UAE, Peru, or another country. Without this critical information, it becomes difficult to accurately calculate the associated carbon emissions and provide actionable reduction recommendations.

CarbonSifr's product solves this problem by employing AI-driven data enrichment techniques. If, for instance, blueberries are listed with an incomplete record, the AI agents take multiple prescribed paths to track the product’s or the supplier’s origins. It also cross-references this information with the platform’s ever-expanding local database, to check if that particular product’s emissions profile is already available. According to Onur, CarbonSifr has already captured close to 80% of the UAE's F&B and tourism supply chain data. 

In cases where the country of origin or specific supplier isn't clear, the platform goes a step further by analyzing trade data, such as import records for the UAE, to deduce where the product might have been sourced. This process allows CarbonSifr to fill in these gaps through a combination of data enrichment strategies, ensuring that businesses have accurate and comprehensive emissions information—even when their initial procurement data is incomplete. 

Making Reduction Recommendations

Once businesses have accurately measured their carbon emissions – the job is not done, this is when the journey of addressing the “so what” starts. The platform provides automated reduction recommendations. For example, the platform can analyze specific items in a company's procurement, such as a hotel chain purchasing thousands of kilos of beef from Brazil, and suggest lower-emission alternatives. These alternatives could be the same type of beef from different suppliers or even the same supplier with a lower carbon footprint. The key is that businesses can act immediately on these insights without needing to change their core operations—no need to switch to a completely different product if beef is essential.

The platform also gives businesses the ability to evaluate the impact of these changes on their overall emissions, allowing them to plan accordingly. On a broader scale, businesses can identify which suppliers contribute the most to their emissions, helping them prioritize reduction efforts. Furthermore, the platform provides energy efficiency benchmarking, such as energy consumption per square meter or per dollar spent, enabling businesses to take action on improving energy use and further reducing their carbon footprint.

Green Financing

In addition to measuring and reducing carbon emissions, CarbonSifr connects businesses with partner banks to enable access to green financing. Once a business has a clear understanding of its carbon footprint and reduction initiatives, the platform helps link this data to financial institutions that specialize in sustainable investments. This creates a seamless pathway for businesses to secure green financing, supporting their efforts to implement and scale emissions-reducing solutions. 

It’s a win-win scenario: by lowering the emissions of their clients, banks not only support sustainable business practices but also reduce their own financed emissions, aligning with their environmental goals. This creates a mutually beneficial relationship where both the business and the bank thrive in their pursuit of sustainability.

Positioning MENA as a Leader in Climate Action

Onur is deeply committed to giving back to the MENA region and shifting the narrative around its role in climate change. He believes that the region, often unfairly associated with being a significant contributor to global emissions, has the potential to become a leader in climate action. By developing cutting-edge tools like CarbonSifr’s platform, Onur aims to empower businesses across the region to take meaningful, measurable steps toward decarbonization. His vision is to transform MENA into a hub of innovation for sustainable practices, showing the world that the region can play a pivotal role in reversing the effects of climate change and building a greener future.

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