BEZERO CARBON

Tommy Ricketts and Brennan Spellacy founded BeZero Carbon in London in 2020, during the same year that net-zero corporate commitments exploded from a niche ESG pledge into mainstream boardroom strategy. The timing was deliberate.

Both founders had backgrounds in finance and commodities. They saw a voluntary carbon market that was growing fast — over $1 billion in 2021, heading toward $50 billion by 2030 by some estimates — but had almost no independent quality infrastructure.

Carbon credits ranged from genuinely valuable emissions reductions to projects that were barely audited and produced credits representing nothing. Buyers, from airlines to oil companies, had no reliable way to know which was which.

BeZero built the analytical infrastructure to answer that question: independent, systematic ratings for carbon offset projects based on their actual probability of delivering the emissions reductions they claim.

BeZero sells carbon credit ratings to the institutions that buy, trade, and hold carbon credits. It works like a credit ratings agency: a buyer or broker pays BeZero to assess a carbon offset project and receive a BeZero Carbon Rating (BCR), which runs from AAA (highest quality, highest probability of real emissions impact) down to D.

Banks, asset managers, airlines, and large corporations trying to reach net-zero commitments use BeZero ratings to verify that the credits they are buying are real. BeZero also sells data subscriptions and analytics to institutional investors and traders in the carbon market.

Revenue is ratings fees plus recurring data licensing.

BeZero Carbon Ratings (BCR) is the flagship — a letter-grade rating system for individual carbon offset projects, assessing the probability that a credit represents genuine CO2 reductions. The ratings cover forestry (REDD+), cookstoves, renewable energy, methane capture, and other project types across 90+ countries.

BeZero also offers a Carbon Market Intelligence platform with project-level data and analytics for institutional carbon market participants. Their ratings are increasingly integrated into carbon trading platforms, brokerages, and ESG data providers.

BeZero's growth strategy is trust-building in a market that desperately needs it. Every time a major greenwashing scandal hits the carbon market — and there have been several, including a Guardian investigation in 2023 that found many Verra-certified credits were essentially worthless — BeZero's value proposition strengthens.

They have also partnered with major carbon market platforms and exchanges to embed ratings into trading infrastructure, which creates recurring touchpoints with the market's biggest players. The brand-building strategy is explicit: be the agency that actually told the truth when everyone else was looking the other way.

That reputation has proved valuable.

The existential threat is the market they are rating. The voluntary carbon market took significant reputational hits in 2023 when major investigations found that a large portion of widely-traded carbon credits — including those certified by established bodies — did not represent genuine emissions reductions.

If regulators and corporations lose confidence in carbon offsets as a mechanism altogether, BeZero's market contracts. Their second challenge is structural: ratings agencies earn revenue from the parties they rate, creating a potential conflict of interest that has plagued the traditional ratings agency model for decades.

BeZero is trying to build a business model that avoids this — where buyers pay for ratings rather than sellers — but it requires scale to sustain.

Coatue Management led BeZero's Series B in 2023 — a significant signal of institutional investor confidence in carbon market infrastructure. Earlier backers include Prelude Ventures (specialist climate tech VC), HarbourVest Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Oxford Science Enterprises.

The investor mix of finance-focused VCs alongside climate-specialist funds reflects BeZero's positioning as financial infrastructure for the climate economy, not purely an ESG or environmental startup.