Scaling Past Carbon Neutrality

Carbon neutrality is an achievement—but for companies at a certain scale, it’s increasingly table stakes rather than an end point. The real challenge lies in what comes next: investing in the technologies that will make deep decarbonization possible at planetary scale. Most of those technologies are not yet commercially viable, which is precisely why capital has to move toward them now.

Figma’s latest move is a $500,000 investment in carbon removal, made through Watershed, the enterprise climate platform and marketplace. The rationale is straightforward: neutralizing today’s operational footprint is necessary, but it does little to build the pipeline of solutions that the next few decades will rely on.

The Gap Between Neutral and Net Zero

When a company purchases carbon offsets to match its residual emissions, it is addressing a balance sheet problem. When it invests in carbon removal, it is funding the creation of durable, verifiable sinks that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—an entirely different category of climate action.

The distinction matters because the current offset market is crowded with nature-based solutions that, while valuable, are not the whole answer. Engineered removal approaches—direct air capture, mineralization, and similar methods—remain early and expensive. Without early capital from corporate buyers, those technologies cannot scale, and without scale, their costs will not fall.

Why Early Markets Need Corporate Buyers

Watershed’s marketplace connects companies with a portfolio of vetted carbon removal suppliers. By aggregating demand from multiple corporate purchasers, the platform gives nascent suppliers the revenue certainty they need to invest in capacity. Figma’s contribution is therefore not act of charity—it is an exercise in market making.

The investment is structured as a forward purchase agreement, meaning Figma has committed to buying a specific quantity of carbon removal credits in the future. This type of arrangement is the standard mechanism for de-risking early-stage carbon removal projects: it lets suppliers fund construction and operations based on a known future price, rather than hoping that spot-market demand materializes later.

What the Portfolio Covers

Details on the specific technologies and suppliers in the portfolio are sparse, but the class of solutions it targets is clear. The goal is to fund a diversified set of approaches that are individually uncertain and collectively indispensable, pushing beyond the narrow set of offset types that dominate current voluntary markets.

Figma’s existing net-zero commitment does not change. What this investment adds is a second, longer-horizon lever that can be pulled in parallel. The company’s climate strategy is thus layered: cutting emissions operationally, neutralizing what remains, and now seeding the removal ecosystem that future generations of companies will rely on.

For technology companies with large balance sheets and significant energy footprints, the calculus is increasingly less about whether to fund removal and more about how quickly a credible, diversified portfolio can be assembled. Figma has placed a modest but meaningful stake—the kind of stake that sends a signal to the broader market about where the next round of climate infrastructure investment has to go.

From Slack channel to $500K climate portfolio

Figma’s Net Zero sustainability-focused social impact group (SIG) began as an informal Slack channel in 2021, co-led by software engineers Silas Tsui and Noah Rowlett. Three years later, the group has steered all proceeds from the Figma Swag Store toward carbon removal credits, led Figma to sign the Climate Pledge to reach net zero by 2040, and made a $500,000 purchase in carbon removal credits through Watershed, an enterprise sustainability platform.

Watershed helps companies measure their carbon footprint, prepare and file climate disclosures, and reduce emissions. Its Marketplace lets organizations build portfolios of vetted carbon removals, managing credit purchasing end to end. Figma’s portfolio spans eight technologies with four different pathways: nature-based solutions, concrete-based mineralization, ocean and algae approaches, and enhanced rock weathering.

Building momentum with concrete goals

Tsui credits the SIG’s traction to having specific targets. Though no founding members had formal sustainability backgrounds, they began by evaluating vendors to measure Figma’s carbon footprint, meeting weekly to share progress.

Leadership supported the effort and trusted the group’s due diligence. After months of research, they partnered with Watershed to establish a baseline. With roughly 200 employees at the time, Figma’s footprint was small enough that the group could reach net zero for its first year with a budget under $100,000. Rather than relying on cheaper nature-based solutions, the group chose Charm Industrial, spending $600 per ton for 20 tons of bio-oil sequestration. The bet was on scalability: Charm’s materials suggested costs could drop to the low hundreds of dollars per ton within five years and below $50 within 20.

Tsui notes the group proposed that removal spending should scale with company revenue, arguing that net zero would become the status quo for companies. “If we hadn’t started this program three years ago, it would be quite hard to be like, ‘Yeah, we want to start this thing. We need half a million dollars,’” he says.

Demystifying esoteric technologies

The eight projects in the portfolio include technologies that are not exactly household names. Rowlett and Tsui relied on articles, podcasts, and YouTube videos to understand the science, and toured facilities in person to close the knowledge gap. Rowlett describes visiting Charm Industrial in San Francisco during his second week at Figma, where team members walked through the process of turning agricultural waste into bio-oil and injecting it underground.

“Although there are lots of different pathways, at the end of the day, you’re taking carbon from one place and putting it somewhere else,” Tsui says. Seeing the process firsthand helped the group build the portfolio with confidence.

Community-driven portfolio building

The group opened portfolio construction to all of Figma. Employees were given the list of projects on Watershed’s Marketplace and asked how they would allocate $100K. This surfaced preferences based on co-benefits like job creation or wildfire risk reduction, alongside the carbon removal itself.

Cost was a concrete consideration. The group targeted a rough average cost per ton while balancing delivery risk across projects that were earlier-stage and others further along. Rowlett sees the inclusive approach as a way to counter climate overwhelm: “A lot of people feel that the climate crisis is too big, too hard, too overwhelming. Taking a piece to learn about is a great way to start building up your vocabulary and understanding.”

Standout technologies

Rowlett is particularly enthusiastic about enhanced rock weathering (ERW). Eion breaks down mineral rock and applies the nutrient-dense powder to fields, reducing fertilizer needs. Rain or irrigation water triggers a chemical reaction that sequesters carbon through rock mineralization—a natural cycle lasting thousands of years. Crushing the rock and getting it to cropland speeds up the process and can work at a scale beyond tree planting.

Tsui highlights how pathways can combine. Living Carbon is planning sites that deploy both its enhanced-photosynthesis trees and ERW: the trees extract more carbon from the air while basalt spread on the ground deacidifies soils and increases carbon yield on the same land. “None of these are really solutions in a vacuum,” he says. “The learnings compound.”

Vintages and forward buying

Like wine, carbon credits have vintages—the year the carbon was removed. Early-stage technologies in the removal market are still scaling up, with relatively low volume. Many purchasers are buying credits for dates well into the future, which helps startups know they have a runway to make their processes work and incentivizes more entrants to the space.

“We’re investing in the future of these companies in a real way,” Rowlett says. “We could just do the fast and easy work and buy low-durability, low-quality carbon removal, but instead we’re saying, ‘Hey, we believe in this company.’”

Lessons for climate organizing at work

Co-leading Net Zero taught Rowlett and Tsui about balancing stakeholder engagement with the operational work of measurement, portfolio building, and community involvement. Rowlett emphasizes positioning sustainability as collective learning: “Where we’ve seen the most positive response is when we’ve flipped it from ‘look at all of these things that are going wrong’ to ‘let’s figure this out and learn together.’”

Tsui’s advice to other companies is to start early. “You don’t have to hit a certain milestone—such as headcount, annual recurring revenue, or a key sustainability hire—to start thinking about your impact.” An early blueprint serves as a north star and can be modified as the company grows, he says.

Rowlett is optimistic about the trajectory: “Being in an organization where Net Zero is so supported gives me so much hope. There are so many voices saying, ‘Take your slice of what you’re good at, what you’re interested in, and what needs doing.’”

Moving from commitments to outcomes

Meeting net zero targets requires more than setting ambitious goals; it demands rigorous, data-driven execution. The company’s climate strategy rests on three operational pillars: measuring every material emission category, reducing absolute emissions in line with validated science-based targets, and neutralizing any residual footprint through durable carbon removal. Reporting against these targets is standardized through frameworks such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and disclosed annually through CDP, with scope 1 and 2 emissions verified by a third party.

Interim progress against the 2024 and 2030 milestones is published in the company’s Environmental Report, which tracks both absolute emissions and carbon intensity per reduced physical product. This dual metric provides visibility into whether efficiency gains are decoupled from business growth, avoiding the trap of reporting only intensity-based reductions while absolute emissions rise.

The role of carbon removal in a net zero portfolio

After exhausting all feasible operational reductions, the residual emissions are addressed with a three-bucket portfolio of carbon removal instruments. Portfolio allocation follows a simple rule: never place a full decade of climate action into a single technology, as no current method alone is both scalable and verifiably permanent.

  • Natural climate solutions — afforestation, reforestation, improved forest management, and coastal wetland restoration. These approaches deliver near-term sequestration with co-benefits for biodiversity, though permanence risks require conservative accounting for fire, pests, and land-use change.
  • Hybrid approaches — biochar and enhanced rock weathering on agricultural lands. Biochar locks biomass carbon into a stable solid, while enhanced weathering accelerates a natural mineralization process; both are measurable but currently limited in monitoring resolution at scale.
  • Engineered durable removal — direct air capture with permanent storage and enhanced mineralization. These offer the highest verifiable permanence (1,000+ years) and are booked only when the removal ratio is proved by measurement and the storage site is registered, with no liability transfer to the seller.

The internal removal standard requires suppliers to certify that: the carbon accounting is ex-post based on measured sequestration, the strategy does not create a land-use conflict with food production, storage monitoring is transparent, and there is no risk of reversal via liability transfer. The project must also result in “net new” removal — it cannot merely repurpose an existing biomass power plant’s emissions, a common greenwashing failure mode.

Contracts are structured deliberately: long-term agreements, typically 10 to 15 years with offtake pricing, provide suppliers with the certainty needed to build capital-intensive facilities. In 2023 alone, roughly $20 million annually was committed through such agreements, funding approximately one-third of the company’s residual emissions. On shorter-horizon vintages, in-year purchases from distributed community projects add local resilience, though these are limited to a small share due to verification lag.

Estimating the carbon budget that needs neutralizing

Setting the residual-fossil boundary requires aggressive assumptions about future progress. A straightforward forecast of current emission-reduction curves would produce a misleadingly manageable removal burden. Instead, the internal carbon price and removal plan are stress-tested against scenarios where regulatory pressure and technological adoption plateau. This yields a budgeted removal liability that is re-estimated annually, tightening as more reduction levers are proven.

Governance and verification of the strategy

The approach is valid only if externally audited. Financial audits and removal credits are independently verified by a recognized accredited body, and the company requires its principal delivery partners to hold an ISO-compliant certification. All projects are filed on a public registry with a tracked, unitized ledger to prevent double counting. Engagement is ongoing with policymakers to strengthen Article 11 a of the carbon market framework and to raise regulatory floors over time.

Credits retired internally are excluded from any external voluntary offset claims to ensure that customers do not inadvertently pay twice for the same mitigation action. Real-world teething problems remain — some early coastal restoration plots failed to meet carbon performance thresholds, and cost-per-tonne figures released by project types diverge widely by geography. Publication of the full removal budget and supplier performance is therefore scheduled in the next Environmental Report, including line-of-sight updates on shared cost forecasts capped under the voluntary carbon market integrity initiative.