Hi HN! We’re Ted and Thomas from Bend (YC S22). Today we’re launching a modern corporate card built for climate-friendly business.

Just by shifting some of your company spending to Bend, you’ll be helping to reduce climate-changing emissions, thanks to the carbon removal rewards you’ll automatically earn, and our embedded climate analytics. But we know that signing up for a new financial service can take some upfront effort, so we wanted to sweeten the deal — create an account today (Friday Apr 21), and we’ll deposit a *$100 gift* in your account to start spending immediately — see the site for details.

How it works:

- Bend is a modern card and cash account, combined with free carbon accounting and climate rewards

- Bend works similarly to how you’d use a business bank account. Send and receive ACH and wires, earn 3% yield on deposits, issue physical and virtual cards with budgets, etc.

- Carbon accounting typically runs companies $40k/year and up. We make money off the card interchange (same as any bank), enabling us to offer the carbon accounting for free, and pass through carbon removal rewards.

- The way we actually do the carbon accounting is laid out here — we always return a confidence score with every CO2e assessment: https://usebend.com/how-it-works

- We have awesome customers like Harmonic AI https://bend.green/harmonic and Fathom https://bend.green/fathom. If you choose, you can create a report of your climate action through Bend like these ones, which you can share with customers, employees, investors, etc.

Why tracking and reducing climate-changing emissions is worthwhile:

- It’s good for the planet (and free!)

- It will help you sell your products to B2C customers who care about the climate, and B2B customers who have set net zero goals (64% of global market cap companies now report on climate data, and are increasingly asking their suppliers to do the same)

Our stack:

- Rust back end

- NextJS front end

- Hosted on Vercel

- Database from PlanetScale

- Card issuing and treasury powered by Stripe and partner banks

- Charts with Visx

How we got here:

We launched Bend last summer as an API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166140. We’re now launching cards directly, because we’re able to offer the functionality for free, and it’s easier for startups to try it out. Prior to Bend, Thomas and I worked at Abacus, where I was one of the co-founders https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7219025 — our background is in fintech, and our goal is to layer in climate insights on top of your financial stack.

We’d love it if you tried Bend out!

user:	ezt
created:	July 7, 2021
karma:	1