Stripe pledged $1 million to carbon removal in 2020. Now it manages $1 billion
Meet the Stripe exec spurring $1 billion in demand for carbon removal. Read More

Stripe payment software enabled $1 trillion in transactions in 2023.
The fintech company wields similarly outsized influence among roughly 300 companies that have pledged a total of $1 billion to buy credits from carbon removal startups. Stripe was among the first to take the leap, committing $1 million to four entrepreneurs in 2020.
The woman behind that initial experiment — and Frontier, the $1 billion buyers group it has become — is Nan Ransohoff, a Stripe employee who borrowed the idea from the pharmaceutical industry, which uses a similar model to accelerate development of vaccines and medicines for emerging economies. The idea is to provide future buying signals for researchers.
“Our primary driving motivation here is the world’s going to need a lot of carbon removal; how do we help get it on its best possible trajectory?” Ransohoff said during a July 17 live interview as part of our Climate Pioneers series.
The goal: A future supply of carbon removal credits
Ransohoff and 14 Stripe employees manage Frontier’s pool of more than $1 billion dedicated to purchases of carbon removal credits. Frontier was co-founded by Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and Shopify and now also includes funding from J.P. Morgan, Salesforce and Watershed. In addition, more than 30,000 Stripe customers — small and midsize companies that use Stripe’s payment platform — earmark 1 percent of their transaction revenue, representing another “tens of millions” of dollars, Ransohoff said, for carbon removal credits purchased through Frontier.
Frontier is an “advance market commitment” (AMC) that supports early-stage carbon removal ventures with pre-purchase contracts that take effect as startups deliver verified carbon removal credits. Such commitments are meant to give confidence to investors that buyers exist for untried technologies. Frontier has signed almost $320 million in transactions, representing the removal of 571,776 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Stripe has long bought carbon credits to be able to make carbon neutrality claims. In 2020, the company shifted its focus to carbon removal credits — rather than those centered on avoided emissions — based on researchers’ predictions of aggressive future demand for carbon removal. Data suggests companies will need to fund 6-10 billion metric gigatons of removal by 2050, alongside real-world emissions reductions to industrial processes, to curtail impact on climate, according to forecasts from Boston Consulting Group.
How Frontier approaches purchases
Ransohoff’s team spends 75 percent of its time evaluating how funds should be spent and doing due diligence for potential contracts, which deliver credits as the removals are completed and verified. Frontier has backed 34 projects across a range of technologies including direct air capture, biomass carbon removal and storage, enhanced weathering, direct ocean removal, and storage.
Among its priorities: supporting verified carbon removal methods that are durable (meaning the CO2 is stored for more than 1,000 years) don’t use too much arable land and will eventually (no timeframe given) be priced at less than $100 per ton. “We’re not going to look for the cheapest tons today; we’re going to look for solutions and approaches that have the potential to be low-cost and high volume in the future, even though they’re not there today,” said Ransohoff.
The price Frontier is paying today is steep; for Frontier’s $40 million contract with Google X spinout 280 Earth the average price-per-ton works out to $650. Frontier reports dramatic reductions for some of its early transactions. Frontier anticipates a 37 percent reduction for the per-ton price related to its work with Charm Industrial, which turns biomass into bio-oil and buries it underground, between the first year of its offtakes and 2030. The cost could fall by 75 percent, depending on execution, Ransohoff said. (As of its May 2023 contract, the average per-ton-price for credits based on Charm’s removal process was $473.)
Some startups will fail
Some projects backed by Frontier have already delivered credits that its members are able to count toward emissions reductions. Not all of these projects will reach their potential.
Its contracts only pay out if removals are actually delivered, offering a degree of protection for its members.
“We have to take these good ideas and try them out in the real world. Sometimes, we learned that it was a great idea, and it was worth testing,” Ransohoff said. “With others, we got a reality check. … Most startups, at the end of the day, fail.”
The collapse of Running Tide, a Maine aquaculture company that got funding from Stripe, Shopify and others — but not Frontier — provided the latest example. It was testing sinking seaweed and biomass such as wood chips into the ocean to sequester carbon dioxide.
The carbon removal market is just getting started
A similar buyers group approach is being taken by NextGen (backed by BCG, LGT, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Swiss Re and UBS). Marketplaces including Carbonfuture and Supercritical are also landing corporate buyers.
Microsoft, which is making durable carbon removal credit purchases on its own, is the single-largest corporate purchaser — it accounts for almost three-quarters of all purchases as of May 2023, and has continued buying.
Frontier has “created the shoulders for others to stand on,” said Alexander Rink, co-founder of market watcher CDR.fyi.
The plan is for Frontier’s mandate to end in 2030, when Ranshohoff anticipates the market will be big enough to attract buyers, but it will take more than voluntary purchases to pull that off.
That’s why it helped found the Carbon Removal Alliance in 2023. Stripe is also ramping up a fellowship program to encourage development of demand-side ideas — including relevant policy interventions such as tax credits, programs that encourage sector-specific action, and government procurement initiatives — to attract the $20 billion needed to scale the market, said Ransohoff.
“As a field, we often talk about the portfolio approach as being important on the supply side; it’s really important to think about the demand side as a portfolio as well,” said Ransohoff. “At the end of the day, we have to sort out what we think it’s important so that the world thinks about how to place enough benefits now.”
Watch the entire Climate Pioneers interview with Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff. Get to know more Climate Pioneers, and watch the next conversation on Aug. 28, with Taylor Francis, co-founder of carbon accounting software and services firm Watershed.
