Alcove

Mars Garza and Marley Rafson

Co-founders

Location / Year Founded / Industry:

New York, NY / 2022 / Climate Tech

What is Alcove:

Alcove is building the technology infrastructure behind the world’s carbon markets. Its software helps project developers get their carbon removal verified and issued, powers the back-end operations of registries like Nasdaq’s Puro.earth, and provides the settlement layer that exchanges and financial institutions use to track and clear trades. In an industry still run largely on PDFs and email, Alcove is the missing digital plumbing — the same role Stripe plays in payments or DTCC plays in the stock market.

Why it matters:

Carbon markets are shifting from a niche, voluntary corner of climate action into government-mandated compliance markets worth nearly $1 trillion a year — but the infrastructure to run them at that scale doesn’t exist yet. Bloomberg, the World Bank, and major industry groups all point to the same bottleneck: not demand, not capital, but outdated, manual back-office systems that make it take months to issue a single credit. Alcove is positioned to become the standard technology layer as compliance markets come online across dozens of countries over the next several years.

Why you should care:

Alcove’s customer roster reads like a who’s-who of global financial infrastructure: Nasdaq has moved its registry technology to Alcove, S&P Global is in final contracting to power compliance markets across a dozen countries, and Intercontinental Exchange and JPMorgan are both in active discussions. As the institutions that run the world’s financial markets build their environmental-asset businesses on Alcove’s platform, the company is on track to become the essential infrastructure that every carbon transaction — and eventually every environmental asset transaction — runs through.