Nan Ransohoff, Carbon-Removal Champion

For years, Stripe has helped companies fight climate change, which the fabulously successful online-payments processor sees as one of the biggest threats to economic growth. It’s put millions of dollars toward the permanent removal of carbon dioxide from the air and built tools into its payments systems that let businesses direct a portion of revenue to that end. But Stripe thought more could be done.

Nan Ransohoff, who previously worked for Uber Technologies Inc. and autonomous-electric-vehicle startup Nuro Inc., wanted to establish reliable, advanced guarantees for businesses with technologies that can permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, just as governments paid for coronavirus vaccines long before they were delivered. She reached out to other companies and, in addition to her own employer’s commitment, got pledges from Alphabet, McKinsey, Meta Platforms and Shopify. (The donors haven’t disclosed their individual contributions.) A unit within Stripe, named Frontier, will work with the carbon-removal businesses on behalf of the funders.