Around 20 employees have been let go by Pachama, a carbon markets company that has won business from Salesforce, Boston Consulting Group and others by providing tools that can identify and monitor high-quality nature-based credits. Pachama’s cuts are the latest in a voluntary carbon market that has been roiled by wider economic uncertainty and anti-ESG sentiment.

“The current uncertain and volatile financial, economic and geopolitical climate, added to the anti-ESG agenda in the U.S., is indeed having an effect on corporate sustainability budgets,” Pachama CEO Diego Saez Gil told Trellis. “The impact is especially acute in the voluntary carbon market, which was already in a moment of correction.”

Strategic retreat

Saez Gil, an entrepreneur with a background in the travel industry, founded Pachama in 2018. The company debuted as carbon credit buyers were becoming increasingly concerned about the quality of forest credits. The remedy it offered: due diligence tools based on remote sensing and artificial intelligence. By late 2023, Pachama had raised $88 million from big-name funds, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, as well as celebrity investors such as Serena Williams and Ellen DeGeneres.

The company had recently expanded into project development, but the departures, announced late last week, are part of what Saez Gil described as “a strategic shift back to Pachama’s original vision: building a technology platform powered by geospatial AI to help make confident investment decisions into nature-based climate solutions and sustainable land management.” Pachama’s headcount is around 35 after the layoffs, Saez Gill said.

That reduction in force is the latest in a series of setbacks for young carbon market companies. Heirloom, a direct air capture (DAC) project developer that has contracts with Microsoft and others, has laid off staff and cancelled a project since November’s elections. Doubts about future federal funding for DAC are believed to be the cause. Last month, Climeworks, another DAC company, cited similar reasons for cutting just over 100 positions from a staff of around 480.

Roiled markets

Turbulence at the federal level hit these companies hard because the voluntary carbon market, a core part of all of their business models, is also going through an upheaval: Controversy over the integrity of some classes of carbon credits has spooked buyers. The total value of cred