Control Versus Convenience in Carbon
Brennan Spellacy, CEO of Patch, on the API layer of the carbon stack
The real divide here is between a climate add on and a climate procurement system. Stripe Climate is built to let a merchant turn on carbon removal in minutes by committing a share of revenue, with purchases routed through Frontier’s portfolio. Patch is built for the buyer that wants to decide which projects to back, how to spread funds, and what monitoring or replacement protections sit behind the credit purchase.
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Stripe Climate is intentionally standardized. Its documentation centers on allocating a fraction of revenue to Climate Commitments, and its inventory comes from Frontier suppliers. That makes setup simple, but the project selection and procurement workflow are handled upstream rather than customized account by account.
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Patch sits one layer deeper in the stack. It aggregates 60 to 70 projects across 30 to 40 developers, lets companies build portfolios, and adds supplier agreements plus post transaction monitoring. That is useful for teams that care about permanence, failure handling, and portfolio construction, not just making a contribution.
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The competitive lines in this market map to different jobs. Cloverly is closest to Patch as an API for embedding offsets into checkout and product flows. Pachama is more specialized around forest project sourcing and ongoing remote sensing based monitoring. Persefoni is upstream carbon accounting software that often plugs into a procurement layer rather than replacing it.
The market is moving toward more control, not less. As carbon buying gets tied to finance, compliance, and brand risk, more buyers will want to see the exact project mix, delivery progress, and downside protections behind every tonne. That shifts value toward infrastructure companies that make carbon procurement programmable and auditable inside broader software workflows.