Show HN: Bend (YC S22) A climate-friendly corporate card ($100 to try it)
usebend.comHi HN! We’re Ted and Thomas from Bend (YC S22). Today we’re launching a modern corporate card built for climate-friendly business.
Just by shifting some of your company spending to Bend, you’ll be helping to reduce climate-changing emissions, thanks to the carbon removal rewards you’ll automatically earn, and our embedded climate analytics. But we know that signing up for a new financial service can take some upfront effort, so we wanted to sweeten the deal — create an account today (Friday Apr 21), and we’ll deposit a *$100 gift* in your account to start spending immediately — see the site for details.
How it works:
- Bend is a modern card and cash account, combined with free carbon accounting and climate rewards
- Bend works similarly to how you’d use a business bank account. Send and receive ACH and wires, earn 3% yield on deposits, issue physical and virtual cards with budgets, etc.
- Carbon accounting typically runs companies $40k/year and up. We make money off the card interchange (same as any bank), enabling us to offer the carbon accounting for free, and pass through carbon removal rewards.
- The way we actually do the carbon accounting is laid out here — we always return a confidence score with every CO2e assessment: https://usebend.com/how-it-works
- We have awesome customers like Harmonic AI https://bend.green/harmonic and Fathom https://bend.green/fathom. If you choose, you can create a report of your climate action through Bend like these ones, which you can share with customers, employees, investors, etc.
Why tracking and reducing climate-changing emissions is worthwhile:
- It’s good for the planet (and free!)
- It will help you sell your products to B2C customers who care about the climate, and B2B customers who have set net zero goals (64% of global market cap companies now report on climate data, and are increasingly asking their suppliers to do the same)
Our stack:
- Rust back end
- NextJS front end
- Hosted on Vercel
- Database from PlanetScale
- Card issuing and treasury powered by Stripe and partner banks
- Charts with Visx
How we got here:
We launched Bend last summer as an API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166140. We’re now launching cards directly, because we’re able to offer the functionality for free, and it’s easier for startups to try it out. Prior to Bend, Thomas and I worked at Abacus, where I was one of the co-founders https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7219025 — our background is in fintech, and our goal is to layer in climate insights on top of your financial stack.
We’d love it if you tried Bend out! Congrats Bend team! It's been incredible working with you from the Stripe Banking-as-a-Service side. Y'all are helping solve a really important problem and this combination of climate <> fintech is long overdue. Thanks Ashwin. And if anyone has questions about working with Stripe BaaS, happy to chat about that as well — it's been great! Eligibility requirements: - You must be a USA incorporated business or organization (no individuals or unincorporated side projects). - You must have successfully completed registration for Bend Cards, via the Stripe hosted onboarding flow. - This is a limited time promotion, and will end tonight at midnight EST. We reserve the right to end the promotion early. - Bend reserves the right to cancel your account, particularly if we deem the activity fraudulent, abusive, unethical, or suspicious. How’s the coverage of your carbon accounting for different purchase types? For example AWS services vs business travel expenses? Thanks for the question! So the way that Bend works, we take a transaction, and then match it with the best available 'emissions factor'. So, for example, if you purchase something at Starbucks, we match that transaction to the Starbucks specific emissions factor: https://bend.green/starbucks Over 65% of total market cap is now covered by this sustainability data, and we aggregate that data, and use it to estimate the emissions for each transaction. Of course there is a very long tail. So if you buy a coffee at a small coffee shop, we likely don't have that merchant-specific data. In those cases, we fall back to "Merchant Category Code" (MCC) emissions factors. And finally, in some cases we have SKU-level data. E.g. we have an Amazon Business integration where we get the actual specific item data. Long story short is we have surprisingly high merchant coverage — well north of 60%. We have pretty limited SKU-level coverage today, but expanding. And then we always have an MCC fallback. The larger the merchant, the more likely we are to have good data for them (we're trying to grow coverage for mid market and smaller businesses with Bend). This means that you can get a pretty detailed, totally automated sense of your emissions hotspots. More info here: https://usebend.com/how-it-works Wow this is awesome!!! Thanks :) Excited for this, just signed up for our startup! Hi HN, let us know if you have any questions! Congrats on the launch! Looks awesome. Thank you so much! Congrats on the launch! Looks great! Thank you! We would love to have you try it out :)