Interview With Erik Stadigh, Co-Founder and CEO of Lune
In this edition of Founder Spotlight, we are featuring Erik Stadigh, a Finnish entrepreneur and business executive, co-founder and CEO of Lune, a venture-funded startup studio based in London. He started Lune with the goal of making every product and service climate positive by default. The company offers an API that combines detailed emissions tracking with high-quality carbon removal, allowing businesses—especially in finance, payments, and logistics—to integrate climate impact directly into their customer experiences.
Erik has focused on promoting climate-positive financial products and improving transparency in sustainability reporting to combat greenwashing. Lune’s platform provides granular emissions measurement, actionable insights, and reliable carbon offsets, which many companies, including Visa and Payhawk, use to meet sustainability goals and differentiate themselves in the market.
By embedding automated climate action into everyday business operations, Erik is helping companies reduce their carbon footprint while showing clear commercial benefits. This spotlight shares his approach to building practical climate solutions and driving measurable impact.
Erik, could you share what inspired you to co-found Lune and focus on making every product and service climate-positive by default?
Growing up in Finland, which is one of the most forest-covered countries on earth, nature has always been close to my heart. Seeing what the climate crisis does to the planet, I became more interested in and passionate about tackling the climate crisis over the years. Eventually, it was all I could think about. We built the vision for Lune based on the belief that to scale climate action to the extent that we need to scale it, it needs to be fully automated and a seamless part of our everyday life.
Lune offers an API that combines granular emissions tracking with high-quality carbon removal. How do you see this technology transforming industries, especially finance and payments?
Finance and payments is at the heart of everything we do. By integrating Lune’s software, spend management platforms, banks, and other related businesses can easily integrate CO2 emissions tracking, reporting, and reductions into their own product offering. By doing so, they stand out from their competition and can better serve their customers. The spend management companies we work with, such as Payhawk and Soldo, end up winning more business because of their sustainability features. All while also having a measurable positive impact on the planet! Today sustainability features are a differentiating factor for spend managers and banks, but in the future it will be tablestakes. Companies and consumers will be able to understand and reduce their impact based on information they get from the products they already use on a daily basis.
How does Lune’s API differentiate itself from other climate impact and carbon accounting platforms in the market?
Lune is the only end-to-end embedded climate action solution. Businesses like Visa, Payhawk, and JAS Worldwide choose Lune because we offer granular Scope 3 emissions measurement, out-of-the-box emissions reporting, emissions reduction recommendations and high-quality carbon offsetting – all from a single, easy to integrate API. In addition, our emission intelligence capabilities use AI to significantly enhance our customers’ experience and the quality of the data they receive.
Greenwashing is a major concern in sustainability. How does Lune address transparency and credibility in climate impact reporting?
The prominence of greenwashing was one of the reasons we started Lune in the first place. Companies were using carbon offsetting to greenwash by supporting bogus projects, using it as a “get-out-of-jail-free card”, and actually not having a positive impact or changing the way they did things. But carbon projects can be the best mechanism we have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere as well as protect nature. At Lune, we have a ruthless focus on finding and partnering with high-quality carbon projects and providing transparency into the projects and their impact. As a result, our customers can contribute to climate action with confidence. Many of our customers have chosen to work with Lune to avoid greenwashing. Carbon offsets are still a contentious topic, but the alternative is that billions of tonnes of CO2 remain in the atmosphere and we keep cutting down forests. We’re trying to change that.
What industries beyond finance and payments do you believe are ripe for climate-positive transformation through software?
Another major industry we’re focused on at Lune is the freight & logistics sector. It contributes approx 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Global supply chains mean that it’s very complex to understand and reduce this impact. We work with freight forwarders, carriers, and other logistics service providers to automatically measure the CO2 emissions of shipments in a very granular fashion, provide automated emissions reporting and enable greener shipment choices in real time.
What challenges did you face in integrating climate impact data into existing enterprise systems, and how did you overcome them?
With the everchanging political landscape we live in, scaling climate action is of course a challenge. Companies struggle to make strategic and budget decisions, because some regulation, such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, might change next month or the month after. We focus on showing the commercial benefits that our customers experience having implemented Lune. It’s about the climate, and building a better and faster growing business. Our customers consistently win more deals and increase their customer satisfaction thanks to the Lune implementation. These commercial benefits are essential, in parallel to measurable positive climate action.
How do you measure and communicate the real-world impact of Lune’s platform to stakeholders and customers?
On the emissions measurement side, we offer actionable insights and analytics that visualise the CO2 emissions and reductions for our customers (and their customers). On the carbon project side, it’s even more exciting, because the impact is more tangible. Photos, videos, and stories from the ground make the impact of project contributions and purchases very real. Forest areas that are protected, new forests that have grown, local communities who get access to healthcare, community kids that get scholarships to study, local employment opportunities and much much more. It’s extremely inspiring.
What advice would you give to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs facing the dual challenge of business viability and environmental impact?
Brace yourself, but don’t shy away from the challenge. It’s the biggest and most important challenge of our lifetime. If you can find a way to offer a solution that has clear business and climate benefits, put everything behind it. We need way more people tackling this challenge!
