I'm Joining Arcadia to Help Decarbonize the Grid
tl;dr: I'm joining Arcadia as Sr. Director, Payment Products. Founded in 2014, Arcadia is a technology company creating unprecedented access to the data and clean energy needed to decarbonize the electric grid. The company raised $325M in 2022 and is the largest manager of community solar projects in the United States (1GW). I'll be leading Bundle, Arcadia's utility billing platform.
When my co-founders and I started Balanced in 2010, we didn't just want to make payments more efficient, we wanted to make it possible for transactions to occur that otherwise wouldn't. By doing so, people could earn their livelihoods in entirely new ways. We ended up pursuing this mission by building specialized payments infrastructure for online marketplaces, a commerce model that was booming but underserved at the time.
Around the same time, Plaid was leading a similar boom in consumer fintech by giving app developers access to banking data, which allowed them to build personalized financial service products that weren't really possible before.
I genuinely believe that deploying infrastructure (of all types) is one of the most effective ways to improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world. When more people have access to foundational tools and data—like payments and banking information, for example—good things will happen.
One of the reasons I've worked on payments and ecommerce infrastructure for most of my career is because it's one of the only areas where dialing up improvements 1-2% can actually make a meaningful difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
— Jareau (@jkwade) February 28, 2023
This is why I'm so excited to be joining Arcadia! Founded in 2014, Arcadia is a technology company creating unprecedented access to the data and clean energy needed to decarbonize the electric grid. The company is coming off a massive 2022. They raised $325M last year and announced that they are the largest manager of community solar projects in the United States (1GW), so it's a really exciting time to be joining.
The world is undergoing a massive transition to clean energy and legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act will only accelerate that. But as Arcadia's CEO Kiran Bhatraju likes to point out "most carbon accounting is made up." Kiran and Arcadia have spent the past decade proving that providing access to timely and accurate utility data (i.e. tariffs, intervals, usage) can meaningfully accelerate the shift to a green energy economy, much as access to foundational technologies stimulated new types of economic activity in the past.
I've been interested in translating my payments expertise into useful contributions at a climate-related company for a while—an extension of our mission at Balanced—and Arcadia fits pefectly into that profile.
I started consulting with Arcadia in January but recently decided to join full-time as Sr. Director, Payment Products, focusing on Bundle, Arcadia's utility billing platform, to start. I had actually fully intended to wrap up my consulting engagement with Arcadia and pursue my newsletter, Batch Processing, full-time until just a few weeks ago. But I ultimately decided the opportunity at Arcadia was too good to pass up.