Since its founding in February 2022, SALT has been guided by a steadfast vision of unlocking the necessary capital for high-quality climate projects that address the urgent challenges of climate change with speed, scale, and equity.

Through hundreds of conversations with project developers, corporates, and financial investors—and witnessing the much-needed "flight to quality" in carbon markets, we see our founding hypothesis reflected in the following market dynamics:

• Lack of access to right-sized, right-timed financing with equitable and transparent terms poses a hugely significant upstream challenge to scaling the supply of high-quality climate projects- across carbon removal, reduction, avoidance, and biodiversity protection. 

• Today, over 5200 corporates, accounting for 40% of the world's private capital, have pledged to reach net zero by 2050. Even as these companies decarbonize, they demand a high-quality supply of carbon projects that enable them to offset and inset in line with net-zero targets. Without solving the financing challenge, the supply of high-quality projects will not keep pace with this increasing demand.

• Thus far, many of these corporates have chosen to procure carbon credits, in voluntary carbon markets, to compensate for their emissions. As the flight to quality in the carbon market continues, this prevailing approach of simply purchasing carbon credits is strained by the quality and greenwashing concerns.

• To seize control and build a high-quality supply of carbon projects with transparency and accountability, an increasing number of corporates are directly investing in carbon projects that produce carbon credits or low-carbon commodities.

We are at a critical inflection point in the development of credible carbon markets: More and more corporates with net-zero budgets are eager to deploy and unlock capital directly into projects, even as the need to rapidly and equitably unlock capital for climate projects expands in urgency and ambition. 

So, why isn't more capital being unlocked from corporates into projects? 

We see this as being a function of the difficulties corporates face with:

• Discovery of relevant projects: Most corporates do not have the in-house expertise or dedicated origination teams to source carbon projects that align with their net-zero pathways

• Assessing risk via objective data: It is hard to objectively assess a project, be it technical or financial viability or carbon sequestration potential, due to the lack of data sets. This is especially problematic when corporates are looking to contract with projects that are early in their lifecycles and before they have produced any carbon benefits.

• Managing & monitoring risk: Corporates have to assess projects-risk at the time of contracting - importantly, due to the long-term nature of forwards and offtake contracts, they’d also have to keep monitoring. managing and reporting on the projects as they evolve to make sure the projects deliver their promoted products

For us, these difficulties point to the question of building trust and openness - i.e.How do we find a new, more scalable & transparent way - with discovery, risk assessment, and project lifecycle monitoring and management built in - to ‘open’ or ‘unlock’ capital to create a trustworthy and robust carbon market? 

Enter Opna.

Opna means ‘to open’ in Nynorsk. It also closely resembles the Hindi and Urdu word ‘Apna’, which means 'ours' and points to the need for ownership and empathy as we create solutions for our planet and communities. 

Opna inspires ‘trust’ and ‘transparency’ and ‘ownership’ to build a level and equitable climate financing landscape- a landscape where we elevate the standards of carbon markets, help corporates credibly reach net zero, and critically lower the barriers to how high-quality climate projects get financed.

Opna is a climate financing platform that empowers corporates to discover, finance, and manage pre-assessed carbon removal and reduction projects, accelerating the journey to net zero. Through offtakes and forward agreements, corporates can use Opna to deploy capital directly into carbon projects, providing essential upfront and scaling financing to bring these projects to life. By aligning corporate objectives with those of project developers, Opna creates a net new supply of carbon projects to accelerate our climate transition.

At Opna, we look forward to working with you with trust, transparency, and ownership.

Warm regards,

The Opna Team