Late last year, Patch published a report with the title, “How to unlock billions in carbon market demand.” The thesis was straightforward: the world’s biggest, most profitable companies were sitting on trillions in profits. If they were able to activate even one percent of that to the voluntary carbon market (VCM), we’d be looking at a massive influx of climate finance.

To put a number on it — a mere 1% of annual profits for the Forbes 2000 would be $45 billion, which is 32x more than the total value of the VCM in 2024.

It sounds simple. But the mechanics of actually deploying that capital are incredibly complicated, and that’s been keeping a lot of money on the sidelines in recent years. Our report showed that only 15% of the largest 100 carbon credit buyers have teams dedicated to carbon. At every phase of the process, these buyers were running into operational hurdles, logistical bottlenecks, and inefficiencies in their processes as well as in the market itself.

There are three main problems that are keeping the VCM from reaching its potential:

1. Market fragmentation: Buyers have to sift through many suppliers, standards and technologies. There’s wildly varying levels of information available about each project — including accurate, real-time pricing data that reflects the real market value of a credit. Altogether, this makes it very hard to get access to the right credits at a fair price. Even if you can cobble together data on a few projects, it can be difficult to figure out how many credits are actually in market — and critically, which suppliers can sell them to you.
2. Lack of trust: Buyers have to find, analyze, and compare data across projects. That data isn’t standardized, and it’s difficult to access at all with limited resources. But the stakes are so high, you can’t afford to skip your due diligence — funding the wrong projects can damage your sustainability program and your company’s reputation.
3. Process inefficiencies: Sourcing, diligence, procurement — these are resource-intensive workflows, heavily reliant on expertise and collaboration among internal and external parties. They don’t just incrementally increase the costs of a carbon program — they can fundamentally break it. While you're running a months-long diligence process or going through lengthy contracting, you might miss out on critical inventory in a dynamic market. And even post-purchase, managing a portfolio across projects, vintages, and suppliers makes tracking retirement, delivery, and reporting hugely prone to errors.

It’s often said that compliance is the key to driving more money to carbon markets. But even if the world’s biggest companies collectively decided to deploy a fraction of their profits toward carbon credits, would they be able to?

Solving these problems is the key to unlocking billions in climate finance — and today, Patch is announcing a platform purpose-built to do it.

The Patch platform is designed to leverage data, expertise, and software at each key decision point and process of your carbon program.

From day one, Patch’s core competency has always been the software we build. It’s the critical lever to driving the scale we need to achieve our climate goals. But software needs data — and in carbon markets, that data is fragmented, non-standardized, and incredibly difficult to turn into action. That’s why human expertise is foundational to translating data into actionable strategy.

In our competitive landscape, these three pillars tend to live separately — or at best in sets of two. For example, sometimes experts will have access to good data, but they don’t have software to collect a comprehensive view of projects and prices or analyze massive amounts of information in a timely manner.

Here’s how the Patch platform is different:

Data: Patch centralizes the global carbon market — project information, prices, and availability — into a single transparent view.

Expertise: Our climate science team becomes an extension of your team, to get you to the most impactful strategy and support you through execution.

Software: We created advanced digital technology powered by AI that centralizes and accelerates your entire purchasing and management process.

It’s easiest to look at our platform page to see how it all fits together through a full buyer journey (or better yet, just take a demo!), but here are just a few points to highlight:

1. Strategy

Our experts will help you define and distill your sustainability program into criteria that we can match to specific carbon credits. In addition to running strategy workshops, they’ll be in the platform with you to build out a best-practice program tailored to your business.

2. Sourcing

The sourcing functionality of the platform is something we’re incredibly proud of. This is where we bring together data from the entire global VCM. We don’t own these credits, so matching your criteria is neutral, but it also lets us aggregate inventory across suppliers to get much more accurate pricing signals. Another problem in the market: since most available pricing data relies on self-reporting, it can be inaccurate. Our platform can also show trends and benchmarks for projects based on real offers and transactions in our network. It helps give a more accurate snapshot of prices.

3. Diligence

The diligence phase of buying credits can be one of the most onerous for companies — there’s so much data to parse, it requires specialized expertise, and a lot of time. We’ve used AI to make it a LOT faster, but without losing the invaluable advice and translation from human experts. Plus, our diligence process gets a head start since the platform shows which credits have been reviewed by our science team and passed the Patch Acceptance Criteria. 

Diligence too often happens in a vacuum — outside diligence consultants tend to be siloed from your strategy, your sourcing process, and your reporting. In the Patch platform, it’s all tied together. Diligence should be more than a box to check; it should feed back into your goals.

4. Purchase

The status quo of transacting credits is something like this: you negotiate prices with suppliers, seek competitive offers without any transparency into market pricing trends, and run a bespoke procurement workflow — then multiply that workflow times every project in your portfolio. 

Our platform irons out a lot of the process and inefficiency by showing you offer insights for every project. Then our team of negotiators delivers the most competitive prices for the volumes you need before executing a single portfolio-wide contract. 

5. Manage

Carbon isn’t the primary focus for many sustainability leaders — they’re rightfully focused on decarbonization. That’s why carbon can often become an end-of-year, time-boxed exercise. But we know that managing credits through delivery, retirement, and reporting can be an ongoing process. And even after retirement, it’s necessary to monitor your credits for risks in real-time. Our platform centralizes all your credits, standardizes the reporting data, and our expert team monitors every project in your portfolio against risk.

Unlocking the biggest possible impact for your company — and the climate

Today marks the official public launch of our end-to-end platform, but it’s been in use by Patch customers for a while. Some of the biggest buyers in the carbon market have been pressure-testing the platform, including Workday, Autodesk, Bain and Company, Capgemini, Deutsche Telekom, and more. Here’s some feedback from IFS’ Chief Sustainability Officer, Sophie Graham:

“Over the course of my career in sustainability, I’ve seen the industry evolve dramatically — adapting to new challenges, technologies, and opportunities. Partnering with Patch has been instrumental in keeping pace with these changes.

Patch has been the expert partner that I've relied on to help enter the voluntary carbon market with confidence and have a strategy that takes us across multiple years. And I love that Patch's software platform is now really an end-to-end experience, putting reliable, accurate data at the fingertips."
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– Sophie Graham, Chief Sustainability Officer at IFS

I want to underscore Sophie’s point about keeping pace with change. This market is so dynamic, and our platform needs to be responsive for our customers to stay ahead of the curve. It’s going to take an iterative mindset to achieve our climate goals. That’s something the tech world does very well — not waiting for perfection to make progress.

That’s why we built this new platform the way we have — not just a point tool for transactions, but a comprehensive solution you can run your entire carbon program through. Where Patch started isn’t where we are today. We can’t just meet the market where it’s at, we also have to push it to where it needs to be. We make our impact by helping you maximize yours.