Patch was featured in our recent EDGE100 report and ranked within the top 100 promising startups.

Brennan Spellacy is the co-founder and CEO of Patch, an API connecting carbon offsetting projects with companies and funds that want to offset emissions. We talked to Brennan to learn more about how Patch serves as a technical layer in the emerging carbon economy and how their two-sided marketplace of projects and companies functions.

Questions

1. What is Patch, what is the problem you're solving, and what are some of the core use cases for the product?

2. What is the process without Patch in the picture or pre-Patch that companies would've had to go through to do this?

3. Why was the API-first aspect of Patch important to you? Why do you think that's necessary to make this business work?

4. How do you build trust on the marketplace?

5. How do you think about attracting projects to the supply side? What is the value proposition for them?

6. Are there ways that Patch can actively work to improve the quality and quantity of the projects on the supply side of this carbon offset marketplace?

7. How has the quality of projects on the supply side of the carbon offset marketplace changed? Are there big new technologies emerging? What’s growing?

8. What are some of the big considerations when a company is deciding what kind of carbon offsetting project to go with?

9. You have partnerships with a few other big players in this market like Persefoni. How do you think about the importance of partnerships in this market?

10. As an API-based carbon offset company, do you see Stripe and Stripe Climate as competitive. How do you think about your positioning with regard to Stripe?

11.  How do you think about the positioning of Patch with respect to companies like Cloverly, Cooler, Dev, and Pachama?

12.  A lot of the clean tech companies of a decade ago really struggled. Are there lessons that companies like Patch in this new wave of “clean tech” startups are taking away from the past there?

13.  What does the developer deployment of Patch look like? What does Patch plug into? What are the data sources and outputs?

14.  What does the typical “carbon stack” look like for, let’s say, an ecommerce company or marketplace?

15.  How do you think about the regulatory landscape here? How big of a tailwind are the various pieces of legislation floating around in the US and elsewhere mandating carbon disclosures?

16.  Where do you see the sea change in this space coming from? When do we reach a point that consumers actively demand carbon disclosures from brands—is that organic consumer sentiment that will drive change, or regulations?

17.  Given some of the ethical guardrails in the space, where does it make sense for Patch to expand? If everything goes right, what does Patch become in 5 years?