Cavex is a cloud-based digital marketplace that will facilitate the collection, verification and monitoring of data on climate positive actions from small projects and facilitate trading through a transparent pricing model. This will enable numerous small, accurately measured projects that wouldn’t have the scale nor resources to go through tailored expert evaluation to participate in carbon credit trading and access climate financing.

In the early phases of this project, FSD Africa provided grant funding to 4RDigital to develop a proof of concept and detailed use cases for Cavex with the aim of improving market infrastructure to facilitate the scaling up of voluntary carbon markets. Following successful concept development, we have provided pre-seed capital to support the build out of the platform and to facilitate a future seed capital raise.

The platform is in its pre-commercial development phase. The minimum viable product is now undergoing tests with the first commercial transactions expected to occur in late 2023 / early 2024, as the project moves into end-to-end trials. The number of use cases (or projects feeding in carbon data on the ‘supply side’) has been extended to incorporate waste-to-energy and clean cooking, adding to projects already underway around reforestation, electric vehicles, distributed solar and solar irrigation. Work on the buy-side also continues, testing out purchase intent and willingness to buy from a range of potential buyers who are motivated by the potential of high quality, high impact credits, typically as part of their progress towards net zero commitments. Work is well underway on critical aspect of independent auditing with specialist organisations engaged to complete a first full audit in 2023.

Once launched, the Cavex platform will be scalable across different use cases and geographies, including across and beyond Africa.