Climeworks expands and automates their equity with Ledgy
“We have over 450 employees today and every one of them gets to own a piece of the company. It was important for us to do this in an efficient way and that we can visualise for people what it means to be an equity owner.” - Andreas Aepli, CFO at Climeworks
About Climeworks
Founded in 2009 by engineers Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks is the global leader in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a service via direct air capture (DAC) technology. With the vision to inspire one billion people to remove carbon dioxide from the air, Climeworks is on a journey to remove carbon dioxide at global scale, focusing on the highest quality, permanent removals.
About Andreas Aepli and Andreas Kempf
Andreas Aepli is CFO at Climeworks. Shortly after he joined, Climeworks raised a CHF 600 million equity round led by Partners Group and GIC. Andreas Kempf is Compensation & Benefits Director at Climeworks. He joined Climeworks in 2023. They both use Ledgy to help manage Climeworks’ cap table and equity plans.
Expanding Climeworks’ ESOP program
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Since its founding in 2009, Climeworks has commissioned the world’s first commercial-scale direct air capture plant in Switzerland, the world’s first direct air capture and storage plant in Iceland, and will soon open a second direct air capture and storage plant that will become the largest of its kind worldwide. To scale up operations and attract the best talent, Climeworks has raised multiple rounds of funding, latterly a CHF 600 million round in 2022.
After joining as CFO in 2021, one of Andreas Aepli’s first jobs was to take on ownership of the company’s ESOP program, which Climeworks decided to make available to every permanent employee. With a growing team and big ambitions for the future, it was clear that this would no longer be manageable on spreadsheets.
“When I looked into the hundreds of Excel files and all the documentation and paperwork associated with the equity plan, I quickly realised that we need an automated solution,” he says. “I not only wanted a solution for ESOP but also for the cap table. In Ledgy, I found a program that combined both in an automated way,” he continues.
Achieving more together
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Today, Climeworks has more than 450 employees and each full time employee has access to the ESOP program, which allows them to own a piece of the company. “It was important to us to do this in an efficient way and that we can visualise for people what it means to be an equity owner. Ledgy allows us to do that in an automated way and also avoiding mistakes that you would have if you did that manually.” says Andreas Aepli.
In 2023, Andreas Kempf joined Climeworks as Director of Rewards and Compensation, and he was quickly added to the team of people from the finance, HR and legal departments collaborating on equity management at Climeworks. He was able to onboard onto the Ledgy platform easily thanks to the experience of the finance team and the help from Ledgy’s support team. He also sees Ledgy having a great impact for employees.
“The employees can sign all the documents electronically and additionally we can generate holding confirmations. They have a perfect overview of their equity in their dashboards which is very helpful,” he says.
Big plans
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“We have big plans and we are continuously growing, so we also want our software platforms to grow together with us,” says Andreas Aepli. As Climeworks expands, Andreas is keeping internationalisation and equity benchmarking top of mind. He is excited to see how Ledgy will continue to develop to fit Climeworks’ current and future needs.
As equity and ownership evolves at Climeworks, Andreas Kempf is confident in Ledgy’s continued support and partnership. “I am convinced that Ledgy will support us in future changes in equity and ownership structures,” he says.
Interested in more stories about companies achieving more together with Ledgy? See all our customer stories here.
