SeaAhead Catches up with Sara Remsen of Fathom Carbon

Image courtesy of Dave from Allegro Photography

As 2023 begins, BlueSwell’s Cohort III moves closer to completing their time in the program. Since September, the founders have been working hard to strengthen their businesses by developing market strategies, practicing storytelling, and gathering feedback on their products and services.  

Back in October, we had a conversation with Kevin Rosa, founder of Current Lab. For our next founder highlight, we sat down with Sara Remsen, co-founder of Fathom Carbon.  

Originally from Boston, Sara now lives in Gloucester and has been a member of the SeaAhead community since its inception. Outside of SeaAhead, she has always been involved in ocean-centric communities. She sat on the Young Leadership Committee for the Museum of Science in Boston and is currently on the board of the Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center. She is also a marine mammal rescue volunteer!  

A former SeaAhead mentor, Sara is now stepping into the founder seat as a member of Cohort III. Over the summer of 2022, Sara founded Fathom Carbon. Fathom is a science-first platform that monitors and verifies ocean-based carbon credits to reduce risk and uncertainty for carbon credit buyers. In BlueSwell, she and her team have worked tirelessly to develop and refine their vision and business model.  

SeaAhead: What is Fathom Carbon’s elevator pitch?  

Sara: At Fathom Carbon, we help measure and monitor carbon in blue carbon ecosystems. These include mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes, which have very high potential for carbon storage and are very critical in our fight against climate change. By measuring the carbon in those ecosystems accurately, we can provide trust and transparency to buyers and investors who are looking to invest in blue carbon credit projects, whether for the carbon removal or for ocean and environmental impact.  

SeaAhead: For anyone that may not be familiar with it, can you explain the concept of a carbon credit?  

Sara: Companies–everyone from Delta to Microsoft to Kit Kat–are setting net-zero climate goals, which means they’re trying to measure carbon emissions from their operations and reduce those emissions. They also want to offset emissions that they can’t reduce by purchasing something called a carbon credit. A carbon credit is equivalent to 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide that has been removed from the atmosphere. When companies buy those credits, it zeroes out the carbon emissions from their own operations, helping them become “net zero.”  

SeaAhead: Are carbon credits a viable option for reaching net-zero climate goals? 

Sara: There’s a lot of skepticism around carbon credits and there are certainly some pitfalls. There’s been some history of fraud and scams. One of the challenges Fathom tries to solve is increasing trust and transparency in that market and providing access to higher quality carbon credits for companies and investors that really want to make an impact in the right way. 

SeaAhead: Why focus on blue carbon projects?  

Sara: Blue carbon is so exciting because it has a high potential for long term carbon removal. There’s a lot of carbon stored in the above-ground biomass–in the mangrove trees themselves, for example. But more than half of the carbon is actually stored in the soil and can stay there for more than 100 years. In a terrestrial forest, most of the carbon is stored in the biomass of the trees. If the tree dies, that carbon just goes back into the ecosystem. On the other hand, mangroves, seagrass, and salt marshes can store a lot of that carbon for a long time.  

SeaAhead: What inspired you to start Fathom?  

Sara: I’ve been in software product design and development for the last ten years. I started another company while I was in grad school at MIT, helping manufacturers better train their employees with augmented reality. I sold that company to PTC, a software company here in Boston, and worked there for a couple of years–and then decided that it was time to solve climate change.  

I reconnected with one of my very good friends from undergrad at Dartmouth, who is a marine scientist. She had been thinking about leveraging blue carbon systems to scale carbon removal. She thought that by monitoring and measuring that carbon more accurately and making that data process more transparent, we could unlock scale for the restoration of those ecosystems. 

SeaAhead: Can you tell me more about your co-founder?  

Sara: I co-founded Fathom with Adrienne Hoarfrost, my friend from Dartmouth. Adrienne is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia in Marine Sciences. She brings a really unique perspective on the academic side of the science. There are a lot of companies and operators who don’t necessarily bring that kind of rigor, and it’s really important to us to be very science-led, be collaborative with the academic community, and make sure that we’re leveraging the best science to make the most transparent decisions.  

SeaAhead: So, you have already founded a successful company, Waypoint Labs. How does that startup experience differ from your work with Fathom? 

Sara: There are a lot of things that are both the same and very different about the startup experience the second time around. The things that are the same are the rollercoaster that you go on when you start a company: the troughs of despair and the highs that come from solving a customer’s problem or meeting a technical milestone. That’s all the same.

The things that have been different come from the fact that it’s a different ecosystem. It’s a different space, it’s a different customer base. I've been able to leverage a lot of practices I used in starting Waypoint around customer discovery, really fast iteration, and prototyping to learn as quickly as possible. That’s helped me tackle working with customers and designing a scalable business. 

SeaAhead: Why did you choose BlueSwell?  

Sara: I’ve been a mentor for BlueSwell for the last couple of years! I was a mentor for Eagle Wu and his company, Vinci VR, in Cohort I, and I’ve been involved with the SeaAhead community since its inception. As I mentioned earlier, the ocean has always played a big role in my life. SeaAhead was really exciting for me, because I had the opportunity to apply my professional skills to an area that I really care about by helping entrepreneurs get their business off the ground. So, it’s very exciting to now be part of the cohort with my own company! 

SeaAhead: So far, which BlueSwell experience stands out to you as particularly helpful or inspiring?  

Sara: There are two things that have been the most helpful for me participating in BlueSwell. One is the amazing network of mentors. We have mentors in both the professional space–like investors or other founders–but also mentors who represent the ocean space. So, we get connections to potential partners, potential project developers, and potential customers. Access to that network has been fantastic. I give a lot of credit to Alissa and Mark for tirelessly building that out over the last few years. 

And the second is this great peer network that I have with other founders. The bluetech space is still pretty small. There are a lot of challenges in founding a company in the Blue Economy. Not all of our challenges are the same, but they are similar. Being able to work together, have candid conversations, and brainstorm potential solutions has been really awesome.  

SeaAhead: What has been the biggest challenge as you develop your company?  

Sara: There is an incredible amount of interest in the ocean space, both from investors looking to invest in the space and from companies looking to buy carbon credits. It’s still so early. It's still very much “wild west”. There aren’t a lot of existing structures or processes to support that level of interest. So, it’s been a challenge to both navigate that chaotic environment but also try to build some structure to make it easier for those groups to participate in a meaningful and impactful way. It’s a lot of figuring things out as we go along and having to chart a lot of new paths. It’s very challenging to get a business off the ground, but that’s exciting for me.  

SeaAhead: What are you hoping to get out of BlueSwell?  

Sara: What I’d really like to get out of BlueSwell is a clear set of next steps based on the great conversations and interactions that we’ve had with the BlueSwell community, with potential partners and customers. We’ve had a lot of great insight and information for the next things we need to build out to improve this business, and I'm excited about taking the next step there.  

The goal of BlueSwell is to help founders like Sara develop their companies and prepare for what’s next. To learn more about Fathom Carbon and keep up with Sara’s journey, check out the Fathom website! As 2023 begins and Demo Day approaches, be sure to keep an eye out for our next BlueSwell founder interview.

Interview by Sophie Colantuono, Fall Platform Management Intern at Seahead.