Gazelle Ecosolutions: Revolutionizing the Carbon Measurement and Offset Industry (Part 3)
By Aliya Carr and Amod Daherkar; Edited by Sandi Ruddick
The following is the final section of a blog series covering Gazelle Ecosolutions Corp, a UT startup success story. The previous parts covered Gazelle’s early ideation days and eventual funding. You can click to read Pt. 1 here and Pt. 2 here.
In the budding world of sustainability, Gazelle Ecosolutions continues to make monumental impacts — and they aren’t slowing down. Continuing growth since their founding in 2022, Gazelle is determined to make their mark within the sustainability space, starting with a soon-to-come commercial launch.
Gazelle works to solve the many complications that companies may face when attempting to gather data for activity-based decision making and impact reports; Gazelle is a platform meant to consolidate, gather, and simplify the environmental data that businesses need to understand their ecological footprint. Gazelle has entered contracts with major corporations like Shell, the second phase of which wrapped up in late February.
As of now, Gazelle’s most major development that the company faces is preparing for and executing on their 2024 commercial launch. Co-founder and CEO Amod Daherkar spoke about the plans for their launch and what Gazelle might look like on a more commercial scale.
“We’re pretty ready,” Daherkar said. “We’re focusing on specific markets and use cases, and we’ll deploy there.”
While gearing for their launch, Gazelle plans to start with carbon markets and slowly expand to other industries to develop a more seamless process. Given Gazelle’s extensive experience within these spaces, deploying their network within carbon markets first is a skillful way to start slow and grow from there. The company initially released commercially to urban project developers on March 4th to begin the process.
“There’s a bunch of markets and use cases, but we’re laser focused right now on voluntary carbon markets. Later this year, we’ll broaden that to insetting agricultural supply chains,” Daherkar said.
Daherkar spoke to the ways in which he hopes Gazelle’s commercialization can make an impact in providing climate-based solutions. He insists that Gazelle is simply one of many creative solutions required to push sustainable efforts forward.
“It’s not going to just be a million direct capture plans, or a million hectares of a rainforest that’s protected. It’s going to be a diversity of solutions,” Daherkar said. “Our big bet is saying that nature is going to be a very large part of [required solutions]. Different mechanisms will come and go, but the underlying need to price and track natural assets will still be there.”
Being bold enough to create an idea and take “big bets,” like the one Daherkar describes, does not come without many lessons learned. Daherkar reflected on his own experiences in creating Gazelle and provided advice to those looking to do the same.
“Raising capital should never be the milestone,” Daherkar said. “Spend time ideating a product or idea that people want to pay for. Don’t make capital itself the milestone from day one.”
Daherkar thought about his time pitching at SEED and the ways in which finally receiving funding got him to where he is now. For prospective entrepreneurs, his message stays the same.
“People are willing to fund and bet on ideas,” Deherkar said. “These [ideas] domino. People that are willing to take bets on your idea are catalyzing things that no one can conceive at that point in time.”
