The certification industry has a problem that looks almost comically mundane until you realise how much money moves around it. Before an industrial company can sell a carbon credit, certify a building material, or prove that a fuel meets a regulatory standard, someone has to verify the underlying claim. That verification has historically required months of manual work — auditors reviewing documents, sampling data, writing reports — and the bottleneck has quietly limited the entire market for industrial environmental compliance.
Isometric was built to break that bottleneck. The London-based company, founded in 2022 by Eamon Jubbawy, has spent three years building an agentic AI platform that replaces manual sampling with complete data coverage — ingesting sensor readings, satellite imagery, supply chain records, and laboratory results to verify industrial claims at a speed and scale that manual audit cannot match. On June 23, it announced a $40 million Series A led by AVP, the independent investment platform backed by AXA, with returning investors Plural and Lowercarbon Capital joined by personal investments from Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr and investor Walter Kortschak.
The plan is to take what Isometric proved in carbon removal and move it across the entire industrial certification market — which the company puts at $350 billion globally. Steel and cement are on the list.
Who Built This
Jubbawy’s prior company was Onfido, an identity verification platform he co-founded that grew to process more than a billion identity checks before being acquired by Entrust for $650 million in 2024. Identity verification and industrial certification are structurally similar problems: both require ingesting and cross-checking large volumes of heterogeneous data to validate a claim about a real-world entity, and both had been done manually and slowly until software made complete coverage possible at acceptable cost.
Isometric is applying the same logic to industrial claims — replacing the auditor’s sample with an AI that reads everything. “Certification has always forced a choice between speed and rigor,” Jubbawy said in announcing the round. “Isometric has eliminated that compromise.”
The seed round — $25 million in 2023, led by Lowercarbon Capital and Plural — attracted a notable angel cohort: Niklas Zennström (Skype founder), David Helgason (Unity founder), Ross Mason (MuleSoft founder), and Ilkka Paananen (Supercell founder). The pattern is consistent: operators who have built technical infrastructure at scale, investing in a company doing the same thing for industrial verification.
What Certify Does
Isometric’s product is called Certify. It uses AI agents to run verification workflows end to end — reading evidence, cross-checking data points across sources, and surfacing the cases that require human expert judgment. The platform integrates with existing systems via open APIs and processes the full dataset behind a certification claim rather than a statistical sample. Work that previously took months, according to the company, can now be completed in hours.
The platform currently operates across carbon removal, superpollutant reduction, low-carbon energy, fuels (aviation, maritime, logistics), and materials. On materials, Isometric’s site lists steel and cement specifically — framing them as inputs for “the built economy.”
The company’s credentials in carbon markets are substantive. Isometric describes itself as the largest certification company in carbon removal by contracted volume — more than 16 million tonnes under contract, according to the company. It is accredited by ICVCM, ICROA, and CORSIA, the primary standards bodies for voluntary and compliance carbon markets. Its current client list includes Microsoft, Anglo American, JPMorgan Chase, and Boeing — companies buying certified carbon removal credits, not construction firms buying materials compliance software. The distinction matters when assessing how real the construction opportunity is.
Why Construction Should Pay Attention
Steel and cement are the two highest-embodied-carbon materials in commercial construction. A large building project can involve thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, each with a carbon footprint that varies significantly by manufacturer, production method, and supply chain origin. As green building codes tighten — LEED, BREEAM, the EU taxonomy for sustainable finance, and an expanding web of Scope 3 reporting requirements — the question of how a contractor or developer proves what is actually in its materials is becoming a compliance problem, not just a marketing claim.
The certification layer for building materials is currently fragmented and slow. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are the primary tool for certifying a material’s carbon content, and they are produced manually, updated infrequently, and not always independently verified. A platform that can continuously certify materials claims — pulling from supply chain records, production data, and third-party sensors — would compress the procurement-to-certification gap that currently makes green material sourcing administratively painful.
That is the construction argument for Isometric. It is not the argument the company is currently making — Isometric’s published client list has no named construction companies, and the primary market it has proven is carbon removal verification for corporate buyers. But the technical capability it has built in carbon markets is directly applicable to the materials verification problem that construction is increasingly being asked to solve.
The Investor Signal
AVP’s participation as lead is worth reading for what it suggests about the customer base Isometric is moving toward. AVP has backed enterprise infrastructure businesses at scale — its portfolio spans fintech, insurtech, and enterprise software, and it operates with AXA, one of the world’s largest insurers, as anchor. Insurers have an acute interest in industrial risk verification: the accuracy of a sustainability claim affects both underwriting exposure and ESG portfolio requirements. An AXA-backed investor leading this round is not a neutral thematic bet.
John Doerr’s personal check is a different signal. Doerr has spent the past several years focused on climate tech — he wrote the book on climate investing and chairs Kleiner Perkins, which has backed a range of decarbonisation companies. His involvement here suggests Isometric sits at the intersection of climate infrastructure and enterprise software in a way that serious climate investors find credible, not just thematically convenient.
What to Watch
The construction opportunity for Isometric is real in principle and unproven in practice. There are no named construction customers in any of the company’s published materials, and the expansion into materials certification is described as a direction rather than an existing business. The question over the next 18 months is whether Isometric can sign the first major building materials producer or general contractor as a reference customer — moving steel and cement from a product page bullet point to a referenceable deployment.
The structural advantage Isometric has is that it does not need to convince construction companies that embodied carbon certification matters. Regulators, lenders, and large developers are doing that work independently. By the time a major general contractor needs to certify the provenance of every tonne of structural steel on a project, the question will be which platform does it — not whether it needs to happen at all. Isometric is positioning to be that platform before the demand is fully visible.
On June 29 — the day after this article was written — Isometric and Canadian carbon company Deep Sky announced the first certified direct air capture carbon removal credits in North America. It is the first time any certifier has received approval from ICVCM to issue carbon credits bearing the Core Carbon Principles label for direct air capture. That is a milestone in the carbon market, not in construction. But it is also evidence that Isometric continues to expand the outer boundary of what industrial AI certification can validate — which is, eventually, how you end up in the building materials business.
