The Long Position

In mid-September, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) joined Isometric’s Series A, taking the round from the $40M announced in June to $50M. The June round was led by AVP, which counts AXA as its anchor investor, alongside existing backers Lowercarbon Capital and Plural. The extension, which EU-Startups estimates at around $10M, also brought in Acario Innovation (Tokyo Gas’s corporate venture arm), Earth VC, the Dubai Future District Fund and others. Isometric has now raised about $75M across its seed and Series A.

The round’s extension is small, but the new name in the round, and what it implies for registry value in the future, makes this deal interesting to me.

Why does an exchange want a stake in a certifier?

ICE runs the world’s largest environmental futures markets. Gordon Bennett, its Managing Director of Utility Markets, framed the investment around how “analogue markets can be transformed through digital infrastructure”. Isometric’s ambition is greater. Isometric is a London-based carbon registry and certifier, currently focused on durable carbon removal and is one of the few programs recognized by ICVCM, CORSIA and ICROA. This round funds an expansion from carbon into industrial emissions, energy, fuels and materials, a certification market the company puts at $350B.

ICE is the second exchange to buy into this layer. Nasdaq took a majority stake in Puro.earth in 2021 and led its €11M Series B in September 2025. Puro’s board is chaired by the Chairman of Nasdaq Stockholm. So, two of the world’s largest exchange operators now own a piece of the companies that form a cornerstone of the carbon market as a whole and especially the growing removals market.

This is interesting given that in recent times, VCM growth projections have been dipping. Early this decade, projections to 2030 put the value of the VCM at close to $100B, which will probably not materialize given recent annual transaction figures (Ecosystem Marketplace reported 2024 transaction value at $535M). If the VCM’s growth is slowing, where is the value of these businesses going to come from?

How do the new registries make money?

The incumbent model runs on volume. Verra and Gold Standard are nonprofits. Project developers pay for registration, review and issuance, and the fee per credit is small. Gold Standard’s fee schedule charges $0.25 per credit at issuance, and Verra earned roughly $0.42 in revenue for every VCU it issued in 2025 (Verra Annual Report 2025). Last year Verra issued 73.7M VCUs and Gold Standard 81M credits.

Isometric changes who pays. Buyers pay a per-tonne certification fee on delivery, starting at $10 per tonne for biomass removal and falling to $3 per tonne above 500,000 certificates a year, with VVB costs included. Puro earned an effective €5.46 per CORC in 2025, and Rainbow (formerly Riverse) about €3.50 in service revenue per credit issued. The newer registries earn 10 to 40 times more per credit than the incumbents, because they are heavily focused on removals which have low-volume, high-value tonnes with a heavier measurement burden.

What do the numbers say about carbon-only economics?

All five programs publish annual reports. Looking at their revenues, expenses, credits issued and revenue per credit estimates across 2024 and 2025, three things stand out to me.

Registry	Year	Revenue	Expenses	Operating result	Credits issued	Revenue per credit
Verra	2024	$27.76M	$47.13M	−$19.37M	105M+	~$0.26
Verra	2025	$30.83M	$31.79M	−$0.96M	73.7M	$0.42
Gold Standard	2024	$21.93M	$13.17M	$8.70M	84M	$0.26
Gold Standard	2025	$20.58M	$16.42M	$4.14M	81M	$0.25
Puro	2024	€2.7M	€7.9M	−€5.2M	406,422	€6.64
Puro	2025	€3.6M	€8.8M	−€5.2M	658,924	€5.46
Rainbow	2024	€0.77M	€1.22M	−€0.45M	~191,000	€4.05
Rainbow	2025	€1.22M	€2.45M	−€1.24M	~129,978	€9.35
Isometric	FY24–25 / FY25–26	Not disclosed	Not disclosed	n/a	15,839 / 62,616	n/a

The incumbents are having to get their house in order. Gold Standard became the largest issuer in the market for the first time, but its surplus halved from $9.3M in 2024 to $4.6M in 2025, and operating result fell from $8.7M to $4.1M. (Gold Standard Annual Report 2025). Verra had to cut its net loss by ~95% to be near break-even in 2025.

The new registries are still sub-scale. Puro grew issuance by 62% but revenue by only 33%, as its volume-based fee reform lowered the take per CORC from €6.64 to €5.46 (2024 report, 2025 report). At that rate it needs roughly 1.6M CORCs a year to cover current costs, about 2.4 times its 2025 output. Rainbow doubled its operating costs in 2025, from €1.22M to €2.45M. Its service revenue grew 78% to €0.45M, but that covered only 18.5% of costs, down from 21% in 2024. In both years, most of its income came from a line reported only as “other income” (2024 report, 2025 report).

Isometric’s contracted book and delivered book are far apart today, because deliveries are over a multi-year timeline. In its 2025–26 financial year, Isometric was selected to certify over 12M tonnes and issued 62,616 certificates, about 0.5% of that contracted volume. At list price, that issuance is approximately worth between $0.2M and $0.6M in fees (Isometric does not publish financials). Even its full contracted book of 16M tonnes, at $3 to $10 per tonne, adds up to $48M to $160M in fees, undiscounted and dependent on delivery in a market where durable removal deliveries have only recently crossed 1M tonnes in total.

Isometric has not disclosed a valuation. If the Series A followed a typical 15 to 25% dilution, the post-money would sit between $200M and $330M.

On my numbers, the implied valuation means that something more than carbon is being valued, because the VCM-focused revenue pool is not as big as one thinks. If the VCM reaches a projected $10–40B by 2030, and registries take a certification fee of 2 to 4% (registries charge per tonne, so their share shrinks as prices rise), the global annual fee pool comes to roughly $200M to $1.6B. Verra, Gold Standard, Puro, Isometric, Rainbow and every new entrant have to share that pool.

Carbon-only is not enough. Where does the next leg of value come from?

Therefore, I believe that a registry’s value will increasingly sit in its certification and data infrastructure, deployed across environmental and industrial markets, rather than just in voluntary carbon fee economics. Non-carbon revenue is close to zero at every registry today. The direction of travel, though, is the same for incumbents and newer entrants alike.

• Isometric’s Standard v2.0 moved beyond removals for the first time, with protocols for landfill methane and HFC destruction. Jubbawy’s annual letter names low-carbon materials, clean fuels and renewable energy certificates as next.
• Rainbow’s 2026 outlook includes research into superpollutant mitigation and industrial decarbonization.
• Verra runs a Plastic Waste Reduction Program and a Nature Framework under SD VISta, and is preparing a Scope 3 Standard Program (Verra Annual Report 2025). Its plastic program has issued around 26,000 credits so far; a small number, but a build-out is clearly under way.
• Gold Standard has started pricing its infrastructure. From January 2025 it began charging per-credit fees on transfers, retirements and Article 6 labels, citing rising infrastructure costs. Income from these fees rose 150%, from 8% to 21% of total income (Gold Standard Annual Report 2025).

So, while a non-profit is starting to price infrastructure access, exchanges, which understand infrastructure economics better than anyone, are buying into the for-profit versions. I’d wager that future rounds in these and other registries will increasingly depend on the interoperability of their infrastructure with other kinds of environmental certifications and attributes. Here as well, as in other areas I have explored, carbon alone seems to be a weak case for long-term sustainability.