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.
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The Paris-based platform structures financial securities physically backed by carbon allowances, allowing retail investors to buy and hold EUAs directly through a digital platform.
Since its public launch in September 2024, it has attracted thousands of users across more than 30 countries, according to the company. On Wednesday it announced a €3.6 million seed round, bringing its total funding to over €5 million.
The round was led by RAISE Ventures, specifically its Raise Seed for Good vehicle, a Paris-based fund focused on tech companies with environmental and social impact.
Groupe Eren, an energy transition investor co-founded by Pâris Mouratoglou and David Corchia following the sale of EDF Energies Nouvelles, joined as a new strategic investor.
Existing backers XAnge, the B Corp-certified early-stage fund with €800 million under management, and Redstone, the European VC with €600 million under management that backed Homaio at its earliest stages, both increased their participation.
The EUA market works through a cap-and-trade mechanism. The EU sets a ceiling on the total volume of greenhouse gas emissions that covered industries can produce, issues a corresponding number of allowances, and reduces that number each year.
Companies that emit more than their allowance must buy additional permits; those that emit less can sell them. Because supply is structurally declining and demand is broadly correlated with economic activity, EUA prices have historically trended upward over time, with significant volatility in the short term.
The €3.6 million is not primarily about survival. Homaio describes itself as already generating meaningful traction, and the round is framed as expansion capital.
The stated goal is to move beyond European allowances into a broader suite of markets tied to the energy transition: international emissions pricing systems, energy markets, the electrification of industry, and other asset classes that have historically been accessible only to institutional players.
The company frames this not just as a product roadmap but as an infrastructure ambition, building the platform through which private capital can be directed, at scale, toward industrial decarbonisation.
Yet, Homaio is not alone in the space. SparkChange CO2, a UK-based ETC product, has offered EUA market access to retail investors via mainstream investment platforms since at least 2021, and Montel News noted this when Homaio launched.
Homaio’s claim to be “the only” platform enabling retail investors to access emissions allowances should therefore be read as a contested description of the market rather than a verified fact.
The company’s more specific differentiator is the direct physical holding model and the breadth of its expansion plans beyond European allowances alone.
The question for Homaio is whether the timing is right. EUA prices have been volatile in recent months, recently testing a floor around €70 amid political pressure from some member states, Italy and Germany among them, for reform or suspension of the EU ETS.
Homaio’s own analysis frames this as temporary political noise against a structural supply deficit that supports the long-term investment case.
Whether retail investors will see it the same way, and whether the energy transition markets Homaio plans to open next will prove as legible to a non-institutional audience, are the bets this round is backing.
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