Anirudh Gupta and Siddhanth Jayaram, co-founders of Climes, offer ways to carbon neutralise everyday activities, from bus trips to ecommerce purchases
(L to R) Siddhanth Jayaram and Anirudh Gupta, Co-Founders at Climes. New Delhi, 27th August, 2022. Image: Amit Verma
Wouldn’t it be great if with every delivery of food, groceries and ecommerce purchase you make, you are offered a simple and affordable way to also make a dent in the urgent fight to tackle climate change? What if someone goes a step further and offers you an option that is even fun, and intellectually engaging by giving you ways to decide where your money should go?
Meet Anirudh Gupta and Siddhanth Jayaram, who are attempting to do exactly this at their climate finance venture Climes. Jayaram and Gupta have developed a solution that allows people to opt in to pay a little extra, each time they make a purchase online, be it a bus ticket or an apparel or even a flight ticket. In the backend, they’re curating a growing list of local climate action projects to which the money thus collected can be channelised by the consumers themselves.
After a degree in political economy from the University of California, Berkeley, Gupta worked in the aerospace industry with Airbus for more than four years till early 2020. He then co-founded a non-profit organisation called Sustainability Mafia, before starting Climes with Jayaram.
Jayaram started out with a degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University, but, after an internship with Toyota, switched to finance, and was a founding member of a fintech startup that was acquired by KredX. That led to a five-year stint at the venture capital (VC) firm Kalaari Capital, before he and Gupta teamed up.
The duo founded Climes Inc in the second half of 2021, with a fully owned Indian subsidiary, Climeverse Private Limited. A $4,000 grant from US-based Terra.do, which offers an immersive course on climate change, helped them test out their idea, that brands could offer a simple carbon neutralisation option to individual consumers via the checkout process.