The Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, an early backer of Google and Amazon, has written the second-largest cheque in a $40 million funding round for Isometric, the London-based industrial certification firm.

Doerr, the billionaire chairman of Kleiner Perkins, the California venture capital firm, invested in a personal capacity alongside the lead investor AVP, which counts the insurer Axa as its anchor backer. The round also drew fresh money from the venture firms Plural and Lowercarbon Capital, and builds on a $25 million raise struck in late 2022.

Eamon Jubbawy, founder and chief executive of Isometric (pictured), said attracting investors of Doerr’s stature would help the company “open doors”.

“We are not selling a simple product into small and medium-sized companies,” he said. “We are selling a suite of certification services into the largest companies in the world. The contract sizes can get very large over time, and having someone like John on board can help to unlock those doors to make those deals happen.”

Jubbawy set up Isometric in 2022 with an initial aim of bringing a more trusted certification process to schemes that remove carbon from the environment. Since then, more than a hundred companies have used its services when buying carbon credits as part of managing their emissions obligations.

Having built that registry of projects, each of which can be scrutinised by independent third parties, Isometric has since pushed into the broader industrial certification market. Deploying several different large language models to build its artificial intelligence tools, it now works with customers such as the miner Anglo American and the tech giants Microsoft and Google to check and certify that suppliers are meeting the environmental standards they have promised.

“Someone like Microsoft or Google wants to certify the carbon projects they are buying from, the clean energy and sustainable fuels they are procuring,” Jubbawy said. “If they are building out data centres, they want to certify the green steel and green cement, and certify the water usage, as they need to be within environmental safety guidelines. There are so many different certification products that they need.”

That breadth matters at a moment when corporate Britain is under growing pressure to prove its green credentials rather than simply assert them, a theme running through the government’s seventh carbon budget and its push to shield smaller firms from the next fossil-fuel shock.

Jubbawy said that by using AI to analyse data sets, Isometric was able to speed up and sharpen the accuracy of certification, cutting the time required from “months” to “hours”. The firm has been contracted to certify more than 16 million tonnes of carbon to date.

It is the kind of productivity dividend that analysts increasingly expect from well-targeted AI adoption, with one study estimating a £105bn revenue uplift for Britain’s mid-sized firms if the technology is taken up at pace.

The company has grown to employ 80 people across London and New York, including 15 with PhDs.

Jubbawy is no first-time operator. He is one of three co-founders of Onfido, the ID verification software provider acquired by the US security group Entrust in 2024 for $650 million. The co-founders, who met at Oxford University, together held about 16 per cent of the business.

For Doerr, whose early bets on Google and Amazon helped define a generation of Silicon Valley investing, the wager on Isometric is a smaller, more personal one. But for a London firm trying to sell trust to the world’s largest companies, a name like his on the share register may prove worth rather more than the cheque itself.

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