Eamon Jubbawy has run a version of this play before, and it worked the first time. He co-founded Onfido, the identity-verification company that checked more than a billion identities before Entrust bought it for a reported $650 million in 2024, a business built entirely on the question “is this person who they claim to be?” In 2022 he started Isometric to point the same machinery at a different question: not whether a person is real, but whether an environmental or industrial claim is. London’s Isometric just raised $40 million to scale that bet across the economy.

Certification is one of those functions nobody thinks about until it stops something from happening. Put a tonne of green steel next to a tonne of conventional steel and you cannot tell them apart; the only thing that makes one worth a premium is a piece of paper certifying how it was made. The same is true before a regulator grants a permit, before an investor releases capital against a climate target, before a buyer pays extra for a clean fuel. Someone has to confirm the claim is true. For decades that someone has done it slowly and by hand, sampling a fraction of the available evidence and extrapolating from there, a process that Isometric says could run twelve months or more and forced everyone into a permanent trade-off: do it fast, or do it right, never both.

Read everything, flag the exceptions

Isometric’s product, Certify, runs AI agents that ingest and cross-check the millions of data points behind a single claim, from sensor readings and satellite imagery to supply-chain records and lab results, then surface only the cases that genuinely need a human to judge. The pitch is not that software replaces the auditor; it is that the auditor, who used to spot-check a sample and guess at the rest, can now have every data point checked and spend their judgment only where the agents flag a discrepancy. What took months takes hours, and coverage goes from a sample to the whole thing.

The proof so far is in carbon removal, which Jubbawy treats explicitly as the rehearsal rather than the play. Isometric says it is now the largest certifier in that market by contracted volume, more than 16 million tonnes, with Microsoft, Boeing, JPMorganChase and Anglo American among more than 200 industrial projects on its books. The Series A makes it, by its own account, the best-capitalised certifier in the carbon markets, and the stated plan is to take the same agentic approach into the rest of the industrial economy: green steel, low-carbon fuels, clean energy, the whole emerging category of things that are worth more only if their provenance can be proven.

The buyers most trained to distrust a shortcut

The round was led by AVP, the firm formerly known as AXA Venture Partners, which counts the insurer AXA as an anchor investor, with returning backers Lowercarbon Capital and Plural and personal cheques from the Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr and the investor Walter Kortschak. The presence of an insurance-anchored fund is quietly fitting, since insurers live and die by whether a claim about the world is true. “For decades the certification industry faced a tradeoff between speed and rigour. Do it fast, or do it right,” Jubbawy said. “With Isometric, industrial companies can get both.” Britain’s economic-transformation minister turned up in the announcement to claim it as a domestic AI success story, which is the sort of endorsement a founder takes and a skeptic discounts.

Here is the part worth sitting with, because it is the whole bet. The entire proposition is that a certificate produced by software in an afternoon is as trustworthy as one a person spent a year assembling, and the people who most need to believe that, the regulators, the insurers, the buyers paying the premium, are precisely the ones professionally trained to distrust anything that calls itself a shortcut. Their caution is not a bug in the market; it is the market. Isometric has built something genuinely useful and is asking the slowest, most conservative buyers in the economy to move at software speed. The technology can be excellent and the adoption can still take a decade. The $40 million buys it the runway to find out which conservatism breaks first: the old process’s, or the buyers’.