London’s Isometric lands $40M to certify the industrial economy with AI

Certification is the kind of work most people never think about until it holds something up. Before a regulator grants a permit, a buyer pays a premium, or an investor releases capital, somebody has to confirm that a claim is true, and for decades that somebody has done it slowly, by hand, sampling a fraction of the evidence and inferring the rest. London-based Isometric has now raised $40mn to argue that the inference can stop.

The Series A was led by AVP, the firm formerly known as AXA Venture Partners, which counts the insurer AXA as an anchor investor. Existing backers Lowercarbon Capital and Plural joined, alongside personal cheques from Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr and investor Walter Kortschak. Isometric says the money will deepen its certification technology and extend the platform across the wider industrial certification market, which BCG has sized at around $350bn.

The company’s platform, 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, flagging discrepancies and surfacing the cases that need a human.

Where a third-party auditor once spot-checked a sample, Isometric’s pitch is full coverage, around the clock, with expert judgment reserved for the calls that require it.

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Isometric built the approach in carbon removal, a market that has spent the past few years trying to convince buyers its credits mean what they say. The company says it is now the largest carbon removal certifier by contracted volume, engaged to certify more than 16 million tonnes, with over 200 projects on the platform and customers including Microsoft, Anglo American, JPMorganChase, and Boeing.

In December 2024 it became the first carbon removal registry to win accreditation from the ICVCM, ICROA, and CORSIA, the three bodies that govern integrity in the voluntary and aviation carbon markets.

That track record sits in a market TNW has followed closely, from Neustark locking carbon into concrete to AI tools built to catch greenwashing. Isometric’s wager is that the verification layer beneath all of it is the same problem wherever it appears.

The founder has run this play before. Eamon Jubbawy co-founded Onfido, the AI identity-verification company that, by the firm’s own account, checked more than a billion identities before Entrust acquired it for a reported $650mn in 2024. He started Isometric in 2022 to apply the same machinery to environmental and industrial claims.

“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. AI agents are here, and they’re making the certification process instant and invisible, unleashing the potential of the industrial economy.”

The ambition stretches well past carbon. Isometric frames today’s certification landscape as a patchwork of registries and standards bodies, each with its own methods and formats, and proposes to pull them onto a single platform held to a single standard, with every certificate published on one public registry. Its named next targets are superpollutant reduction and low-carbon energy, fuels, and materials.

“Certification has always forced a choice between speed and rigour. Isometric has eliminated that compromise,” said François Robinet, managing partner at AVP, calling the company “genuinely category-defining.”

Blair McDougall, the UK’s minister for economic transformation, called Isometric “exactly the kind of frontier AI success story we want to see built and scaled in the UK.” What the funding buys, in plainer terms, is room to expand the services. Whether the rest of the industrial economy wants its certificates issued in hours rather than months is the bet now being placed.