Cutting Costs, Boosting Impact: UpEnergy’s Journey to Smarter Carbon Project Management
Background
UpEnergy is one of the world’s leading carbon project developers, headquartered in Kampala and operating across Africa. They use carbon finance to deliver clean cookstoves, water treatment systems, and electric cookers to low-income communities—helping families save money, improve health, and cut emissions.
With over 100 projects across 8 countries, UpEnergy has improved the lives of more than 8 million people and reduced over 10 million tonnes of CO₂.
Over the past six months, we’ve worked closely with their carbon, product, and data teams—led by Anantha, Azeite, and Ashok (aka “the A team!”)—to roll out CarbonHQ across their operations.
Before switching to CarbonHQ, UpEnergy relied on Salesforce to manage project data. While functional, it was expensive and not designed for the specific needs of carbon projects. As a leading developer of high-quality carbon credits, UpEnergy conducts rigorous data checks to ensure the integrity of every credit issued. But with millions of records, this process was highly manual and time-consuming.
Since switching, UpEnergy has reduced its tech costs by over 50% and automated a significant chunk of its data processing and validation workflows.
“As we enter the new era of carbon projects under Article 6, strong data transparency and rigorous financial efficiency will become non-negotiable. Every dollar counts. By replacing Salesforce with CarbonHQ, we've cut platform costs by up to 50% while gaining a purpose-built tool designed specifically for carbon project developers operating across multiple products and markets. Instead of overpaying for unused features, we now leverage 100%—and more—of what we pay for.”
Francisco Cockbaine, Director of Products
CarbonHQ in action
One of the first things we tackled was data structure. Carbon projects depend on clear, transparent data—but that’s hard to maintain when different teams use different tools to collect it. With CarbonHQ’s flexible import tools, UpEnergy was able to consolidate data from multiple sources and build a consistent structure across the organization.
[Pic: UpEnergy is able to have full control over its data structure with the Custom Fields page]
UpEnergy manages huge volumes of data across millions of households. Each record can contain dozens of data points: photos, GPS coordinates, text, numbers, and relevant personal info. Making sense of all that is no easy task. Now, with CarbonHQ, their team can explore datasets, filter information, and access detailed project data instantly.
[Pic: CarbonHQ establishes a single source of information while maintaining flexibility of Excel.]
As a high-integrity carbon project developer, UpEnergy carries out rigorous data validation to ensure the quality of its carbon credits. Before using CarbonHQ, the team relied on a series of manual checks in Excel to flag anomalies and duplicate records. This created a significant amount of manual work for the team at UpEnergy and consumed valuable resources internally. . With CarbonHQ’s built-in validation rules, UpEnergy has been able to automate nearly all of its data checks—dramatically improving both efficiency and data quality.
[Pic: Setup automated data validation rules and say goodbye to manual data checks]
More broadly, our work together is laying the groundwork for a more modern and efficient carbon program—powered by digital MRV, real-time credit tracking, and streamlined sales operations.
Summary
Why did UpEnergy have such a positive shift after switching from Salesforce? It’s simple: we only build software for carbon project developers. It’s all we do. That means our product is focused, purpose-built, and constantly evolving to meet the real needs of the people building carbon projects on the ground.
Even though our team is based in Australia, we make it a priority to spend time with our customers. Here’s a photo of Allen visiting the UpEnergy team in Kampala.
Hear it from a true legend in the carbon space—Anantha, VP of Carbon Programme at UpEnergy:
“CarbonHQ has been instrumental in our journey to digitize carbon project development. Their platform allowed us to eliminate cumbersome manual processes, streamlining our project data management and further our continued focus on high quality carbon credits. CarbonHQ is a true partner in driving efficiency and reliability in our carbon initiatives.”
Anantha Rajagopalan, VP of Carbon Program
At the end of the day, we believe we won’t solve climate change without a lot more high-quality carbon projects just like UpEnergy’s, and we won’t get those if they’re still being built in spreadsheets and PDFs.
Building great software for carbon project developers is the most impactful thing we can think of doing right now and UpEnergy continues to lead the way on this thanks to our partnership.
If you’re developing carbon projects, we’d love to show you how CarbonHQ can help. Whether you’re dealing with cookstoves, water filters, reforestation, or anything in between, our platform is built to save you time, improve data quality, and get credits issued faster.
Reach out at [email protected] and let’s chat.