Carbon Re has appointed experienced entrepreneur Josh Vernon as its new CEO. Carbon Re is an industrial AI company that is focused on decarbonising energy intensive industries such as cement, steel and glass which are responsible for 20% of global CO2 emissions.

Josh Vernon has relocated from Sydney, Australia, to join Carbon Re in London. His most recent role was with Humanforce, Australia’s leading provider of HR/HCM tools to frontline workers.

Josh joined Humanforce following the sale of Earnd, where he was Co-Founder and CEO. Earnd, Australia’s first employee financial wellbeing platform, was founded in 2019 and acquired by Greensill Capital in 2020. At the time, Greensill was a $6bn Softbank-backed behemoth.

During Josh’s time at Greensill, the team at Earnd grew from 12 to over 100 and the customer base expanded to include 100s of 1000s of employees from the world’s best brands including Bupa, Tesco, NHS, Pizza Hut, JD Sports and many others.

Following the collapse of Greensill in 2021, Josh and his team worked with the administrators to find a new home for Earnd with Wagestream, the world’s largest social impact fintech supporting more than 3 million employees globally on their journey to financial wellbeing. In 2023, Wagestream sold Earnd to Humanforce.

Josh Vernon said:

“Carbon Re has all the ingredients for great success – unique AI-driven technology solutions, an incredible team with world-class expertise, and strong commercial traction. My first days with the company have brought this home to me really strongly and I’m incredibly excited to work with the team to help take the company forward.”

Josh takes over from Sherif Elsayed-Ali, a co-founder of Carbon Re, who stepped aside from his day-to-day role as CEO in order to pursue new decarbonisation challenges in 2023. Sherif led the company through successful pre-seed and seed funding rounds to fund the development of the company’s business and technology solutions.

The three other co-founders, Buffy Price, (Chief Operations Officer) Aidan O’Sullivan (Chief Technology Officer) and Daniel Summerbell (Chief Solutions Officer) continue to focus on developing and deploying Carbon Re’s technology solutions and leading the engineering and machine learning teams.

Christoph Gras, General Partner at Planet A, a leading investor in Carbon Re and member of the Board, welcomed Josh to the company and thanked Sherif for his huge contribution:

“We are delighted to welcome Josh as the new CEO of Carbon Re. The company is gaining traction with its AI-driven solutions delivering real impact to cement manufacturers across the world. Josh brings expertise of scaling software solutions and creating high-functioning teams, which will be invaluable to the next phase of Carbon Re.”

“I’d also like to pay tribute to Sherif, whose vision and determination to achieve a zero carbon future was instrumental in the initial creation of Carbon Re and its success to date. He, Buffy, Dan and Aidan saw the opportunity to use ground-breaking AI to address the challenge of industrial decarbonisation and together they built the company to address that challenge. They recruited a team of exceptional engineers, scientists and managers to join them and Sherif was a powerful motivator for that team.”

Carbon Re leverages world-class expertise from UCL and Cambridge University in AI, energy efficiency, and industrial process improvement and was the first joint spin-out from the two universities.

The company raised £4.2 million in seed funding in late 2023 to scale up development and deployment of its novel technology. The company’s AI powered platform enables the highly pollutive cement industry to reduce over 50 kilotonnes of annual CO2 emissions per plant. Each installation of the software saves as much CO2 as taking 11,000 cars off the road. Energy-intensive industries, such as cement, steel and glass, account for over 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are one of the hardest sectors of the economy to decarbonise.

Planet A Ventures, a Berlin-based green tech venture capital firm led the investment, with follow-on participation from Clean Growth Fund, UCL Technology Fund and Cambridge Enterprise.

Carbon Re executive team (left to right – Aidan O’Sullivan – Chief Technology Officer, Buffy Price – Chief Operations Officer, Josh Vernon – Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Summerbell – Chief Solutions Officer)

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For further information please contact:

press@carbonre.com