In alignment with the IDB Group's priorities in the fight against the climate crisis, IDB Lab made a follow-up investment in the ClimateTech startup Sugo Company, focused on value creation in the waste minimization and effluent treatment sectors. 

This funding is part of a US$7 million Pre-Series A round led by Nazca Ventures and supported by FEMSA Ventures. With this investment, IDB Lab expects the expansion of both SugoStore, a circular economy e-commerce, and CoreZero, Sugo Company's platform, to promote the global net-zero agenda in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Millions of tons of food and consumer products are wasted annually worldwide despite still being usable. In Latin America, around 10% of total retail production is at risk of being thrown away, and the impact of global food waste alone accounts for 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating the rate of global warming. As a result, along with the global climate crisis agenda gaining speed, preventing carbon emissions and their offsetting has led to a renewed importance of generating new carbon credits.

In 2020, after developing its own methodology for carbon quantification based on waste diversion and launching SugoStore, in 2022, Sugo Company launched the CoreZero platform, which uses state-of-the-art technology to measure project efficiency and serialization of carbon credits, providing end-to-end traceability, transparency, verification, and monetization. In addition, CoreZero integrates with different projects to measure their impact and enable the generation of reduction units and carbon credits in non-"traditional" sectors.

Through this project, it is expected to avoid 8 million tons of CO2 emissions per year in the fight against the climate crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean.