CarbonChain bets CBAM makes importers pay for carbon data; covers 35% of EU steel imports

CarbonChain (London) is a carbon-accounting platform for high-carbon supply chains: it calculates and reports embedded emissions for commodities like steel, aluminium and fertilisers, used for CBAM declarations, bank disclosures and product carbon footprints.

That carbon regulation on imports — CBAM in the EU, then the UK — would make granular supply-chain emissions data a must-buy for traders, banks and manufacturers.

$10M Series A (April 2023) co-led by Union Square Ventures and Voyager Ventures, following earlier seed rounds from 2019–2022.

Adam Hearne and Roheet Shah founded CarbonChain in London in 2019, betting that emissions data for commodities would become a commercial and regulatory necessity. The platform automated Scope 3 supply-chain accounting and won banks and traders as customers; its methodology was verified by Bureau Veritas and validated by SGS against the GHG Protocol.

In April 2023 CarbonChain raised a $10M Series A co-led by USV and Voyager Ventures, opened a New York office and hired 30 people. The EU's CBAM transitional reporting (from October 2023) and definitive phase (from January 2026) turned its data into a compliance must-buy for importers; by 2025 it shipped CBAM-specific tools including the CBAM Impact Calculator and a CBAM Supplier Catalogue, and claimed the deepest coverage of any carbon accounting platform for EU steel, aluminium and fertiliser imports.

Still running and expanding: CarbonChain pivoted from carbon accounting to carbon intelligence in May 2025, launched a CBAM Supplier Catalogue in November 2025, and is positioned for CBAM's 2026 payment phase.

CBAM made emissions a legal, monetary quantity: every imported tonne without verifiable data defaults to the EU benchmark and costs more, so importers had to buy accurate data.

Focusing on transaction-level commodity data instead of corporate footprints matched the regulation's unit of measurement — the import declaration.

Banks and traders adopted the platform early for their own disclosures, creating a customer base that became a flywheel for the CBAM era.

The accumulated dataset (3.2 billion tCO2e tracked, 11 million product footprints) became a moat no new entrant could quickly copy.

When a regulation turns data into money — importers pay for embedded emissions — the winner already owns the dataset; CarbonChain's transaction-level data became the moat when CBAM went live.

As of 2026-09-02 CarbonChain is running and scaling through CBAM's definitive phase, which began January 2026: the company claims coverage of about 35% of EU steel, 40% of aluminium and 50% of fertiliser imports by volume, with 3,500+ suppliers and 7.5 million tonnes of CBAM goods supported. In May 2025 it pivoted from pure compliance to carbon intelligence — benchmarking, exposure forecasting and pricing tools — and in November 2025 launched its CBAM Supplier Catalogue for shared installation-level data. It continues to serve commodity traders, banks and manufacturers across the EU and UK.