Sign in
Coffee with: Farouk Jivani, founder and CEO of Zeroe: Jivani (LinkedIn) is the founder and CEO of UAE-based cleantech startup Zeroe which provides a carbon management software and platform to help companies track their decarbonization performance. He is also a founding partner of Renoir Tech Ventures, where he continues to be an active investor in software and climate tech startups. Jivani previously worked as a management consultant, project manager, business analyst, C-level executive, entrepreneur, and angel investor in 20 countries over the past 19 years.
ICYMI- Zeroesecured USD 2.2 mn in seed funding last month,in a round solely carried by Indonesian investor Owen Rahadiyan. The funds will be used to support the company’s expansion plans in MENA and Southeast Asia. Zeroe has already launched its platform to companies in the UAE.
We sat down with Jivani to discuss how Zeroe’s AI-powered carbon accounting platform drives sustainable finance to market, and the company’s expansion plans.
Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:
Enterprise: What’s the driving force for Zeroe’s foundation?
FJ: We believe carbon accounting is the ‘source of truth’ in achieving any climate targets. As capital continues to flow to green tech projects, an efficient, verifiable carbon monitoring and reporting mechanism and platform is paramount to ensure climate financing is channeled appropriately. Developed markets like France are leading by example on the carbon disclosure front, passing policies that require all publicly listed companies to report their greenhouse gas output. Companies operating in our neck of the woods can expect a similar format in the next 2-5 years. A company that’s not comprehensively measuring and reporting its carbon output today will have to do so tomorrow.
We built the company in the summer of 2022 after the outcomes of the COP26 conference in Glasgow showed us that the climate action front is growing beyond the EU, and with the past two global climate summits coming to the Mena region, that definitely increased our confidence in the potential of the regional climate tech ecosphere.
E: How can the platform be integrated across different business sectors?
FJ:Zeroe helps firms map out their organization and set their own operational and financial (emissions) boundaries, allowing them to plug into their existing tech stack — like Enterprise Resource Planning for construction firms for example. We also use AI to ingest vast amounts of corporate data, and assess it against disclosure metrics relevant to a given organization’s operations. Our platform intelligently tracks the appropriate decarbonization strategies for firms in line with their respective industry’s emissions factors and categories. Our platform reduces the need to hire in-house climate resilience experts, which remains a key problem for private sector players.
E: Can Zeroe’s carbon accounting platform help companies access green finance?
FJ: We can help drive sustainable finance to market because companies looking to secure finance for decarbonization projects often need to measure and report their emissions to access climate funding. By providing a reliable carbon monitoring platform which can also track ESG performance on credit lines or debt extended to borrowers, we are able to help these firms secure loans from banks and other financial institutions.. In most developing markets, we believe that catalyzing this form of sustainability linked funding to market will be the most effective decarbonization tool. Regulatory changes are not what is going to drive change fast enough, the reality is that money will drive change faster.
E: What role do you see AI playing in creating a net-zero pathway on country levels?
FJ: To create a net-zero pathway by 2050, entire economies will have to adopt efficient carbon accounting systems in order to avert global disaster. We are leveraging our AI-powered SaaS to help government entities including the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and the Dubai International Financial Center to help them realize their sustainable finance targets.
E: What’s next for the company?
FJ: As an ADGM holding company focused on the GCC region, we plan to use our seed funding to fuel expansion in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia but we’re still at an early stage. We spent the last year building an enterprise-grade minimum viable product based upon my co-founder Ali Najafian’s (LinkedIn) decades of experience building software, and also plan to earmark more than a third of the USD 2.2 mn financing package toward further building out our platform.
Our future funding plans will be tied to the markets that we need to enter. We are not trying to build a paper unicorn focused on raising a lot of capital to hike valuations without tangible impact, but instead we are focused on sustainable growth and valuations with solid client backing.
