Homaio raises €3.6M to bring carbon allowance investing to retail

The Paris startup opened the EU’s emissions trading market to private investors in 2024. Now it has the backing to expand into energy, electrification, and other markets shaping the industrial transition.

Valentin Lautier says he got the idea for Homaio on the Eurostar. He was reading a Financial Times article about European Union Allowances, the carbon permits that Europe’s factories, power plants, and airlines are required to surrender each year to cover their emissions, and noticed that prices had been rising steadily.

He also noticed that, as an individual investor, there was no straightforward way to buy them. The market was the backbone of Europe’s climate policy, running at close to a trillion euros in annual trading volume, and it was almost entirely closed to anyone who wasn’t an industrial company or an institutional fund.

Lautier founded Homaio in 2023 to change that.

The Paris-based platform ...