Patch

Many technology companies are calling themselves AI-native service firms this year. Here's a test: can you point to work you delivered for one client, in their specific context, that no expert team could have produced at that speed or that price? At Patch we do, every day. A recent example. A client asked how much CCP-eligible carbon credit supply would exist that actually meets their procurement spec. Answering it meant assembling ICVCM review status, methodology and registry data, project documents, forward issuance estimates, historical approval and issuance behavior, and explicit assumptions about how the market evolves between now and 2030. That data is fragmented, inconsistent, and buried in documents running hundreds of pages. It also can't be answered by counting what exists today. In its May 2026 decisions, the The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) counted 6.44 million credits issued under ACM0008, the coal mine methane methodology, and few of them are expected to clear the CCP label once the approval conditions apply. A current count tells a buyer what exists under today's rules. It says almost nothing about what will be issued, approved, rated, and available to buy in 2030. AI handled the breadth: document review, extraction, normalization, and analysis across a corpus no team would ever read line by line. Our experts handled the judgment: which sources are authoritative, which variables actually bind the client's spec, which assumptions are defensible, and how to present a result that stays uncertain. A traditional consulting team could have done this work. The cost and the timeline would have capped the client at one or two questions when they had a dozen. A generic AI tool could have produced an answer too, with no market context behind it and nobody accountable for it being right. That is what AI-native services means in practice. The economics change, so clients stop rationing the questions they ask. Full analysis in the comments.

Every enterprise has a growth mandate. It's been true across every business model, every industry, every era of commerce. What changes is which inputs growth depends on. For most of industrial history, the scarce inputs were predictable: labor, capital, raw materials. The companies that secured them grew. The ones that didn't failed. We're at an inflection point where technology, geopolitics, and the physics of climate change are changing the paradigm. Growth today requires different inputs than growth of the last century. Carbon is the most counterintuitive example. It's strange to think of an absence as a resource. But that's effectively what a carbon credit is: a claim on avoided or removed emissions that an enterprise uses to manage its exposure in an increasingly regulated market. At Patch, carbon is where we've been focused since we started. And what's become clear is that it's no longer a CSR consideration. It's strategic. The regulatory environment is solidifying, the use cases within net-zero frameworks are becoming clear, and there's a growing body of evidence that a warming world directly constricts resource access and growth globally. More carbon in the atmosphere means less growth. But carbon is one part of a larger shift. The enterprises we work with are also working through how to secure renewable power, sustainable fuels, and the physical materials that drive the energy transition. The resources that will define competitive advantage over the next decade are, in many cases, ones that companies haven't had to actively manage before. What they share is a common challenge: these markets are complex, opaque, and require expertise that most organizations don't have internally, and that most advisors can't provide across all of them simultaneously. Over the last year, we’ve been increasingly active in markets beyond voluntary carbon. At the same time we’ve been building an AI-native platform that models resources across suppliers, assets, technical diligence, order management, and market intelligence for carbon and transposing it to other environmental asset classes like SAF, renewables and low carbon building materials. The new Patch is built for the future of business: not just growth, but sustainable growth.

Introducing: Patch’s next chapter. The macroeconomic environment Patch was founded in was very different than the one we're in today. The early 2020s were filled with low-cost capital, excitement about corporate altruism, and a desire for global cooperation to tackle some of the world’s most existential problems. It was a brief moment in time that could be summed up by my first COP, in Glasgow, casually referred to as the “business COP,” referring to the hundreds of climate commitments made in Scotland’s largest city. That world is gone. Over the last five years, enterprise leaders have been pushed to grow faster, become more resilient, and do it all with a leaner team than in a pre-LLM world. This has led to a resource race — to get the critical inputs to scale the enterprise, whether that’s power, metals, fuels, etc. At Patch, we got our start in supporting global companies with running their carbon programs. Helping CSOs set their strategies, move to an always-on procurement model, and supporting behind the scenes to ensure their transactions delivered on time. In order to do this effectively, we’ve needed to build two core capabilities: 1. An AI-native platform that models resources across suppliers, assets, technical diligence, order management, and market intelligence. 2. Our embedded strategy group that becomes an extension of an enterprise’s team, deeply understands their goals, and uses our software to accelerate carbon programs toward greater impact. Together, these two pieces deliver better outcomes for carbon programs. The right credits, on time and under budget. But more than that, it was helping them align climate impact to business impact. Today marks the day we bring our AI-native services to help enterprises globally ensure the futures of both their sustainability programs and the growth of their businesses. To not only help enterprises build a high-integrity carbon program, but to help them secure the renewable power, low carbon fuels and physical materials they need to grow sustainably. Companies have always had to grow or die. But at this pivotal moment, they have a choice: to grow sustainably or leave the future up to chance. If you're struggling to secure the commodities you need to build that future, or you don't know which resources you need, I want to hear about it. We built the system to solve those problems. Let's build a future of sustainable growth.

Superpollutants, aka SLCPs (short-lived climate pollutants), are bad. There are roughly 30 or so mechanisms I know about for destroying, limiting, and otherwise mitigating these chemicals from getting into the atmosphere where they increase global warming anywhere between 28 (methane) and 24,300 (sulfur hexafluoride) times as much as CO₂. I sorted the major mechanism types into four general categories to help understand where buyer capital is flowing. Superpollutant mitigation is one of the fastest growing categories in terms of buyer demand. It makes sense why: the most urgent need for these projects is right now, so each dollar has a huge amount of leverage right now over preventing some of the worst effects of climate change. There's a lot of really useful data on superpollutants, methods of abating them, and market dynamics in my latest guide: https://lnkd.in/g_5RgDNE Thanks to my co-authors Kyann Hadife and Bee Hui Yeh! And special thanks to Erik Hansen and Lou Mark for providing quotes for the paper. Got any questions about these projects or this data? Put them in the comments! I'm ready to answer.