 Hello, everybody. Well, this is called social distancing. It's quite hard to create an intimate interview atmosphere. I'm delighted to be back at Slush. Go Slush! Well done. Thanks. It's fantastic to be back. After such a long time, I bet everyone's so relieved to be able to interact in the real world once again. I certainly am. And it's absolutely fantastic to see you, Lou Mille. And in fact, actually, you've got a fantastic Slush story, haven't you? Because you were selected as one of the top 50 startups just a few years ago here at Slush. And now you're on stage in an interview situation. So congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it feels quite funny to think that the last Slush edition Planet was pitching on stage as part of the top 100, and then we got to top 15. I guess we have a story to tell, which makes me happy. I definitely do. Let's get a little bit of news out of the way first. First of all, well, this morning you made a big announcement. You've basically created your platform is based around the idea of companies being able to benchmark themselves against things like ESGs, environmental, social governance metrics and climate metrics, of course, as well. So that's just announced. We're going to get into that. But do you want to give us the top line news? Absolutely, yeah. So for the context of those of you that don't know what we do at Planet, we have been historically focusing a lot on environmental analysis, so going deep into carbon accounting. Today, this morning, we announced that we're going deep into ESG assessments for companies, and in particular for financial institutions and their portfolio. Many here would be connected to the idea that startups need to also inform their investors on how they're performing on these topics because it's becoming prominent in the choice of employees, customers and so on. So with this in mind, we've automated reporting according to different standards and also according to custom templates that a VC might have. Great. OK, well, we're going to get into that. Let's get some other news out of the way. Only a few weeks ago, you raised a $10 million series A-Round with HV Capital, Keen Venture Partners. And you've also had some investment from Demeter I.M. Kopanian and Softbank. So Softbank is also an investor with you guys, which is pretty good news. But you've also since 2017, you've worked with Society General, Albion VC, BMW Foundation, BC Digital Ventures. So you're working with some big companies now. So it's like you no longer kind of in the in the low country, as it were. And but in the space that you've, you know, been in since, you know, pretty early 2017, you've got a bunch of new competitors. You've got Silvera, which has raised seven million dollars. Sweep in France with five million. Supercritical 2.7 million dollars. France's EcoVardis. Emit wise in the UK, three million. Sweden's normative raised ten million dollars. So this is getting a crowded space, isn't it? So the idea of being able to, you know, track your emissions, track your ESGs, etc. I'd like for you to kind of tell us what's different about Plan A right now. First of all, I would like to make a comment about you mentioning Severo because actually Sam and the whole founding team are really good friends. And we have been extensively talking if there's actually an overlapping in element in our value proposition. And I think we don't think so. But funny you say that, I'm going to chat to them afterwards. It's still early days. You're all playing in the same kind of space. So you're probably friendly with everybody. But what's different about what you're doing? Totally, yeah. And I think this is what probably is important to clarify so that also these comparisons cannot necessarily be easily drawn. First of all, Plan A exists since 2017 and has had since day one, a big scientific team in-house. That's something that gives us a different edge in terms of alignment to particular methodologies, accuracy, and most importantly, being able to fill in the gaps when data is missing. Missing data is one of the biggest challenges that companies face, especially on an enterprise level, which is where we act in terms of clients. And it's also something that enables us to really be aligned to the impact that we want to make. If you want to be focusing on supporting also the improvement of the health of our planet, you want to make sure so that you follow science. The second big difference is that our platform has a strong focus on decarbonization and now ESG improvement. We have a full team in-house that has been working for decades on setting up the agenda of Germany, for example, as a country on how they can reduce their emissions, writing the IPCC report and other things. So with this focus, we really are not only about the assessment, we're actually about how do you act upon having gathered all that data. I see, but you're doing quite a lot of automation inside that, right? Is that correct? Yeah, that leads me to the third point, actually. So complex data processing is also another capability that has been made a prominent need in all of our discussions and work with many clients. If you think of a company like BMW, they're sitting on millions of data points only for one particular entity within the group. So having the capacity to connect to their BI systems, having our own APIs to be able to also tap into other types of VIP systems has been crucial for our capacity to deliver. And that kind of combining all these other elements, the science, the decarbonisation, ESG improvement is essentially a full cycle. You mentioned decarbonisation. I think it's really worth putting this in context. Hello, everybody over there. The IPCC report basically said that we've got, well, it was 10 years, but now it's nine years, to halve emissions on the planet. And then after that, that's till 2030. Then 2030 to 2040, we have to halve emissions again. So this is the scale of the problem is pretty enormous, isn't it? In fact, but the exciting thing is that there's, the estimates for the market on emission management solutions is somewhere between $10 billion and $26 billion. That's in the next five years. So actually, obviously it's an enormous problem we've got to tackle. But hopefully it's such a big market that there'll be huge players coming in and obviously you're an early player. But one of the problems I think that we're often faced with is how do you tell the difference between one solution and another? You know, how are the people here supposed to be able to pick up through the marketing material of all the companies that are going to help them with their emission management? At the moment, we faced a bunch of challenges related to the fact that we're still early days within the industry. On one hand, there's an increased amount of funding going into the space, which makes it not necessarily always easier for many to depict what is the true solution. And also, many of the companies that might get funding would not necessarily be checked for the Alliance to Science or for the methodology that is behind the product. The second challenge is related to the fact that still communication is a powerful tool for convincing someone that you've done a good job and that might, unintendedly or intendedly, lead to greenwashing, which I'm sure many of the people from the audience are familiar with. The best way for anyone to take on an assumed impact and then analyze it for their own sake is, first of all, to look into the distribution of the action between offsetting and between actual change that the company would do. You mentioned all these targets that have been set for companies. These targets are not for compensation. This is not for offsetting. And essentially, what this means is that companies actually need to change something about the way they do their business. Give us an example. You mentioned greenwashing. Companies will say, OK, it looks like we're emitting this much amount of carbon. If we buy this forest or whatever, then we're good and we can carry on doing our work. There's that going on. You probably have a few thoughts about that. The thing is, if you really want to decarbonize, and I would suggest also even going carbon negative, not just net zero, because there's so much carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, we've got to do something about that, how can you do what else can we do? Cooler servers, make everyone bicycle to work. I don't know, what's some of the practical ideas you've got? I always find the example with the trees and the forest really funny, because poor trees, they've been now used as the biggest excuse for someone of doing something in the particular context they were speaking. So I think if we speak about startups, there is quite a few levers that need to be considered for acting on your own emissions. It's not about the size of a company. Any company that you can take has negative impact on the planet, it's just that the scale is different. The first stage maybe for acting is, of course, understanding what's the status quo. This is measuring. It doesn't need to be with plan A, but you can take any of even the open source calculators that give you an inaccurate but at least some sort of indication that you have some impact on certain topics. Most likely what's going to come out is that your company is energy intense, because there's some servers that end the background building your AI model and so on. An example for someone that is building anything related to AI, we are vandalizing. I think it's now 40 companies within that space. And on average, the emissions coming just from the building the models is around 70%, which is insane. A second thing that you can do is related to engaging your stakeholders. And this is your employees, your customers. The employees is probably the easiest, because these are people within your house or within your stack. And you can get them to become sustainable in their own houses if you work from home or for you to change the way the office is set up. And then the final one, which is sometimes a bit challenging, especially after we've been deprived from traveling a lot over the last few years, is related to changing the policies within the company related to the activities you support financially. Maybe it's related to travel. Maybe you should travel by train. A second thing that you can do is also about the consumption. We, for example, as a company, have a no-meat policy, so no money that Plane buys food with go towards any meat products. And these small things probably can lead you to accept the AI model, because that gets a bit more complicated to around 20% to 30% reduction. For the 70%, this energy, and in many cases also the scope three category one, purchase goods and services, which could be your suppliers if you have physical products and so on. There it takes a bit more of an engagement with maybe switching your energy provider, your server provider, and also getting your third parties and suppliers to start reducing themselves. I see so you can sort of tick all of these boxes. Effectively, what am I doing? Buying a certificate from you guys or you're assessing my company internally or is that how it works? The certificate comes a bit later on because as we spoke of setting is maybe only the last step of the way. The first step is actually to calculate the emissions and the ESG as announced today, performance of the company. Then our system is able to automatically recognize which are the worst performing indicators, but also which are the biggest levers for reduction? What are the low hanging fruit versus the more complex ones? Let me just get into this a little bit more, but because what I want to know is, like you've done all this stuff, you argue that this is going to be a competitive advantage. The companies that benchmark themselves against emissions will be higher rated, then would be more valuable. If they benchmark themselves against ESG, environmental, social governance, and perhaps even the UN's sustainable goals, SDGs, that they will be more highly rated, more valuable, potentially have a competitive advantage. Why is that though? Is it because they'll attain a higher valuation? Because investors will be more interested in? Is that because investors themselves are becoming more, the LPs in VC funds are becoming more sensitive to this subject? Why do you think that is? There's three particular reasons why a company should take today action on sustainability if they want to be the leaders of the market of tomorrow. First of all, it's related to your employees. We have seen it extensively that actually the companies that we work with and others that have taken sustainability seriously are able to retain their employees a lot better. Why is that? Because people today choose their job with their values first in mind. And that's something that is understandable. Because we... That's about hiring a lot. Absolutely, yeah. If you look at the market at the moment, it's insanely difficult to get the top talent because there's a lot of cash in the market. We have so much funding flowing in any type of company. And if you are this cutting edge... I don't know, I'm going obviously in the green tech space, but cutting edge process optimization company that automates some data flows or whatever, you are against another 50 players. And how do you stand out for your employees? Sustainability stands within that as a top priority. And there's a lot of research on that. The second reason is related to your customers. We work with fashion companies and other B2C types of clients. And what you see in terms of the work that they do is that they cannot sell anything if it doesn't explain the story behind the product, be it the supply chain, be it actually what actions are we taking to eliminate waste. We had Black Friday just a few days ago and I was in London, as we know. And what ended up happening was, I was kind of assuming that there was going to be all of these flashy Oxford Street campaigns, nothing. And later on, because I investigated what was the reason for that was that 85% of retailers in the UK decided that they're going to boycott Black Friday because of how people perceive it. And then the final element is what you were saying in terms of investors. We work extensively with VCs, banks, and basically the whole pyramid and the distribution of money, private equities and so on. And what you see is that the extensive concern that now exists for a carbon bubble, which we can get into at another time maybe, where basically fossil fuels at the moment are living off subsidies and potentially the market is going to explode, is leading anyone that is sitting on a lot of money and most likely is dependent on fossil fuel companies to be concerned that this market is not going to be existing anymore just because of these shifts towards renewable, because of instability of the energy sector that we've seen just two weeks ago. And that trickles down up to the bottom of where the money goes into a startup, not the way at the bottom, but where the final chain of command in the distribution of funding. And I think it's of utmost importance for anyone that is seeking funding who is considering getting external financial support to know that they're going to be challenged on what they're doing on the ESG topic because if the VC is benchmarking this company against any other within the same sector, they're going to see, okay, these guys have a good financial performance, but we found the company with slightly less good performance, but still with a more utter ESG setup. Or at least if they're both on the same level and one has benchmarked themselves on ESGs and emissions and the other one hasn't, then that first one is probably more of an interesting proposition, I guess, is that right? Simple due diligence setup, yeah. But the other thing that we've had recently is the COP26 event. And I know that you said that some businesses that operate in line with ESGs will be on the right side of history as governments continue to price in externalities and risks. But obviously governments are slow moving. We've seen that with COP26 and the pretty disappointing result that ended up being kind of a mish, a muddle through and didn't really meet the expectations, especially of climate campaigners. Governments are moving super slowly right now. Does that mean that the private sector that you're obviously we're in, are we going to be able to step up to the plate with these kinds of solutions you're talking about? I actually was at COP and I spoke as part of the official program on day finance and I must say I was quite disappointed to see how the event was portrayed from the outside in comparison to what was happening on the inside. The truth is that as much as maybe the final agreement was not necessarily what we expected in terms of the level of commitment that we wanted with phasing out coal and so on, actually there was so much going on on the outside that was not even reported on. And that was exactly as you rightfully leading to the connection between the governmental sector and all the other stakeholders because even though the final outcome of COP, an event that has been historically a governmental affair was this agreement that for one year these governments are going to now do some work to then complete something by 2030-40, there was actually a lot of private sector people and a lot of different companies with commitments to sustainability there and the engagement was pretty impressive. We as a company work with the private sector because we believe that they have the biggest lever for change. They have capital to move, they have people to get excited about the topic and they also have the necessity to stay competitive and in the context of what we were just speaking now we definitely have a lot of examples of why any company should take sustainability in the good way without doing greenwashing as their top priority. They want to actually be the leaders of tomorrow. You mentioned greenwashing. What some advice that you could give the people here about what to avoid? What sort of, I mean avoid the charge of greenwashing shall we say? Is it the offset against a forest in Romania or something or what is it? What would you describe as greenwashing? I always find funny this example of a bottle that is made out of paper and then the second photo of it is actually it's cut half and then you see that inside there's a plastic bottle. So really good metaphor for the approach that many people have taken to sustainability trying to cut corners or kind of trying to tell a story that is not actually the truth one. I think sustainability should be perceived as a journey rather than this kind of we're climbing now ever so we're going to prepare for five years to be able to achieve that. It's more like climbing a hill. And what this means is that we really need to start thinking of the small steps that we can take today rather than committing to 2030, 2040 to be able to achieve reduction. First lever for kind of greenwashing avoidance. Please don't focus on offsetting. Because it's a sole solution. It just does not work. It doesn't do a big difference to our planet. As it is by itself. It needs to be combined with other activities. Second thing is involve your stakeholders. You need to take care of your employees because they might be disengaged with your inaction on climate because they just don't know you want to take action. To bring the company with you. Exactly. And the company is investors. The company is the employees, the suppliers, the customers. And finally communicate a journey rather than something that is like, cooking our carbon neutral. It just doesn't work like that. In the same way that we've created the issue of climate change, we also need to know that this is how we actually are going to address the issue. It's not going to be about direct air capture. And I know for many this is going to be a controversial statement. It's actually going to be about the society moving towards and understanding that we need to embed a sustainable model of thinking and acting that actually respects the planet as part of the value proposition. You talked about, yeah, you mentioned direct air capture which is a technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But it is controversial because it's relatively untested. It's still very early stage. And I guess if somebody invents it, then oil companies will go yippee. We can carry on drilling for oil. I guess another thing I wanted to ask you was, you know, lots of startups here. Should startups themselves be doing due diligence on their VCs, on their investors? Should they go to their investors and say, what are you guys doing? You know, maybe we should benchmark you. It's a fantastic question. And it's actually one that in line with the fact that we just raised our Series A has been quite prominent for us. There's two sides of it. On one hand, for anyone that is working in the green tech industry, it is of utmost importance that you pick a VC that really understands what problem you're addressing because, honestly, if someone is just giving you money because they see the hype, when the moment comes when you have problems, maybe the deployment of your technology is not necessarily happening in the way that you would have expected. Maybe there's other challenges on an economical level for the whole planet. You're gonna be questioned first because they actually didn't understand at the first place what you're really building. And then they're gonna maybe create some problems for your company, you don't wanna do it. On the second side of the story, for those of you that don't deal with the topic of climate change or green tech as part of your value proposition, even though you should, you certainly can think of the VCs as the ones that are gonna be your financial stability. They're gonna be the ones that, once you're going through the next stages, you are gonna be asking questions, you're gonna be getting feedback from, they need to understand how important it is for the financial sector to be stable. And the stability of the financial sector depends actually on how they respond to climate change. I was speaking two weeks ago with the annual gathering of the German banking industry. And we were talking on stage about the fact that at the moment banks are so scared of what's ahead of them that they have literally put together teams that are acting like a COS team, a squad that is solely there for crisis response, which I think many of us maybe don't think of when we think of climate change. Yeah, but I saw a report saying that recently the European banks are actually just completely unprepared right now. Very quickly, we only got a couple of minutes left. I know that you started the Green Tech Alliance, certainly co-founder. What is the Green Tech Alliance and what's going on with it now? Where is it now? Where's it going? Green Tech Alliance was a story that kicked off in the beginning of COVID with the big concern that the sustainability, the Green Tech community was being threatened by COVID. We started seeing, especially in Berlin and now in other places where we have offices like Paris, London, that there was term sheets being pulled, there was contracts being canceled because sustainability at that point was not that big of a priority. So with this in mind, we build a community that on one hand has the startups. We have now more than 1,000 startups which are selected based on the alignment to science. There's an application process, an interviewing process. And then on the other hand, there's more than 500 advisors, people like you, who have been dedicating one to three hours a month to speak to the startups and give them for free advice on how they can build up their company. And the point of this community is essentially to allow for these companies to grow without having to deal with the hindrances that normally any company would have to see. There's no business model behind this. We're not making money out of it. We're putting actually our own savings. And we're super proud to see that there's been probably like more than like 40 million in terms of funding that has gone into the community just through introductions there. That's very cool. So yeah, worth checking that out. Last question quickly, very quickly. Are we gonna do it? Will we make it? Yes. Will we save the planet? Yes. We're not saving the planet. We're saving humanity. The planet is fine. The planet will be fine. Yeah, the planet will be fine. The planet will still be here. Exactly. It's us. So it's in our self-interest. Yeah. We'll be able to do it. I think it's just a matter of activating this, not only capital, but also the talent that we have towards working and collaborating because the moment is still a bit of a mess. So, but I still believe that we have a chance. We have a chance. Luba Mina, Jordan Nova, thank you so much from Plan A. Have a great slash everybody.