Allinfra has developed enterprise software to help institutions achieve their sustainability goals.
Allinfra was founded in 2018 in Hong Kong, and now has 25 staff working remotely.
Who are its founders?
The company was founded by Dave Sandor and Bill Kentrup.
Sandor has been involved in the financial markets since 2004, most recently at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Dave set up Allinfra with the founding team to solve issues existing in real asset investment, climate products and related data. He has a deep interest in blockchain technology, digital twins and self-sovereign identity.
Kentrup has worked in Asia’s environmental and infrastructure markets since 2001 across Noble Environmental Solutions & Carbon Credits as well as Macquarie Bank and Macquarie Capital. He partnered with leaders in the blockchain space and focused on applying blockchain technology to the financing of infrastructure and environmental assets through the establishment of Allinfra.
What does Allinfra do?
The startup has developed enterprise software intended for the climate market. Allinfra Climate is a blockchain-based environmental platform that helps institutions achieve their sustainability goals.
It collects climate-relevant information, such as energy used and renewable energy produced, directly at source from smart devices across an organisation’s portfolio of assets. This end-to-end solution builds a repository of auditable, immutable data that can be used for a host of purposes: reporting environmental performance to stakeholders, undertaking green and sustainable financing, or even creating environmental financial products in digital form, such as renewable energy certificates (RECs) or emission reductions.
Together with its asset tokenisation platform Allinfra Digital, Allinfra intends to bring access, choice and liquidity to global infrastructure and environmental assets. Indeed, Allinfra Digital was with green financial products in mind, especially green bonds. Organisations use it for the creation of digital instruments representing the value of real and financial assets, covering everything from account creation, KYC/AML, CRS & FATCA, digitised subscription agreements and other functionality that is critical to asset tokenisation.
In November 2022, the startup announced a product update: the Allinfra Climate Dapp. Working alongside Allinfra Climate, this is a decentralised application built to transform the way environmental financial products (especially RECs) are created, transferred and retired. The Dapp is intended to increase transparency in environmental financial products with accurate, granular data, while improving efficiency and reducing costs for the buyers and sellers of such products by eliminating intermediaries.
What’s your target market?
Allinfra is targeting ESG and sustainability teams of financial institutions, corporations or even government entities, organisations or teams that are looking for transparent, verifiable methods to achieve ESG goals and support ESG-related financial product reporting and monitoring.
“We also work with the producers of environmental financial products (e.g. renewable energy companies) that could benefit from more accurate, efficient and cost-effective ways to monetise green projects, which helps drive more capital into projects that have a positive effect on the environment,” the startup adds.
Its clients and partners include ConsenSys, Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, Link REIT, Schindler, Mapletree, Asia Clean Capital Vietnam, Canopy Power and UPC Renewables.
With the Bank for International Settlements, for example, Allinfra worked on two projects to provide the technology for the gathering and reporting of verifiable data used for the creation of financial products and green asset performance measurement.
How is your product or service disrupting your market?
According to the startup, Allinfra Climate represents “a major breakthrough” for three reasons. Firstly, it helps solve major challenges such as double counting and greenwash, by collecting and storing data from the device or asset level in a way that ensures it cannot be tampered with.
Secondly, the standard process for similar environmental data collection and verification is manual, which can be expensive. Moreover, it can take even eight months to complete one cycle of data collection and reporting, Allinfra says, resulting in a report that is relevant only to that snapshot in time and usually designed for a single purpose.
“Our solution significantly or entirely puts that process on digital rails, meaning data is accruing up to the last few minutes and is accessible any time for a variety of purposes. The pandemic further underlined the merit of digitising these processes, a period during which site visits were difficult to impossible,” the startup comments.
Thirdly, while there has been a lot of exciting innovation in the web3 world, this is a use case for the underlying technology that can make a verifiably positive impact on the environment and more effectively help us in the fight against climate change, Allinfra concludes.
What are your biggest challenges?
“As with any cutting-edge technology – despite the obvious benefits for the market – adoption of web3 technology is still in its infancy,” Allinfra says. “It will be vital to continue hiring the right people, and in the right locations given the international reach of our work.”
It is making progress: for example, the startup partnered with ConsenSys on an initiative to launch the Ethereum Climate Platform (ECP). ECP intends to accelerate capital into climate-aligned assets at scale and address Ethereum’s former proof of work carbon emissions.
This initiative was launched two months after the Merge eliminated 99.992% of Ethereum’s daily energy needs. The platform is being built for and by the Ethereum ecosystem, but the intention is to serve as a model to the global tech and business community to address their own historic carbon footprint.
