Pressure from authorities, the market and civil society on companies to properly measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions seems to be beginning to mature, after a decade and a half of progress and setbacks. Ugood example of this is the C round of capitalization of the startup Watershed Technology, which raised US$100 million and brought the company's valuation to US$1.8 billion.

For one of its founders, the climate business is becoming THE business, he told Bloomberg. The venture was founded by three former employees of Stripe, a financial services firm that set ambitious climate programs and goals for several years, including the launch of the Frontier CO2 removal fund. In fact, Watershed has partnered with Frontier - which in turn has brought in other large technology and consulting firms - to provide its clients with carbon removal services.

Watershed offers a platform to measure, report and reduce a company's emissions. The company uses the concept of "carbon under management" to measure its growth, which currently totals 479 million tons of CO2 equivalent, or 1% of the global total. Its goal, obviously, is to continue to grow this number, however, as the number of companies using the platform continues to grow, the volume of CO2 under Watershed's management should decrease, as one of its business objectives is to help its customers reduce their emissions.

While global standards for measuring company emissions were established some 20 years ago, measurement has become increasingly difficult as measurement requirements have been extended throughout a company's entire supply chain.. Watershed has told Bloomberg that its clients include four of the six largest banks and six of the top 10 largest private equity.