Rethink Carbon builds the digital infrastructure for intelligent land use. At its core is Dr Zoë Russell, ecologist, former public sector leader, and founder, whose 16 years at NatureScot gave her an immensely grounded understanding of why land management decisions so often fail: not for lack of intention, but for lack of the right tools.
Together with co-founder and CEO Mark Caulfield, Zoë spotted an opportunity that sat squarely at the intersection of her expertise and his. A Scottish Government CivTech challenge in 2021 gave them the runway to test it. They haven't looked back since.
Rethink Carbon now offers three products: Rethink Insights, Rethink Engage and Rethink Codes, all geared towards supporting landowners, project developers, corporates and governments across the UK voluntary carbon market.
Support from Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, including access to its International programme in Singapore, played a pivotal role in sharpening the company's global perspective.
This is a case study on building with purpose, finding your footing, and growing on your own terms.
Rethink Carbon started with a CivTech challenge in 2021, a Scottish Government prompt asking whether technology could help land managers make smarter decisions about what to do with their land.
Zoë brought the ecological expertise. Mark brought 30 years of software development experience. Together, they made it through the accelerator, secured a contract, and formally founded the company to carry the work forward.
That early brief evolved. The real opportunity wasn't just land use decisions broadly. It was the UK's voluntary carbon market, specifically the two nature-based mechanisms at its heart: woodland planting and peatland restoration. Twenty percent of Scotland is covered in peatland. The storage potential is enormous. The infrastructure supporting it wasn't keeping up at the time.
Before engaging with Techscaler's international programmes, Rethink Carbon was doing the hard work of figuring out whether the problem it was solving was one people would actually pay to fix. Nature markets hadn't scaled the way many had anticipated. Customers were used to their own methods and didn't always see the value in switching. Without customers, there was no revenue. Without revenue, no capacity to reinvest in the product or build a proper sales function, which made winning customers harder still.
When Rethink Carbon joined Techscaler's International Missions programme, Zoë used the time ahead of the trip intentionally. Weeks of preparation, researching carbon standards in Southeast Asia, identifying relevant organisations, reaching out cold, meant she arrived in Singapore ready to have real conversations, not introductory ones.
What she found there reframed the scale of what Rethink Carbon was working towards. The carbon market in Southeast Asia operates at a fundamentally different magnitude: peatland projects running to 5,000 hectares or more, compared to the 20 to 100-hectare projects typical in the UK. Even though the problems were recognisable the scale of it was not.
The networking environment Zoë encountered in Singapore was unlike anything she'd experienced at home. People in her sector, carbon project developers, methodology experts, climate tech founders, were willing to sit in a coffee shop for two hours and walk through everything: the good, the difficult, the structural problems no one talks about openly.
That openness gave Zoë something valuable: honest market intelligence and a broader sense of what the carbon sector looks like operating at scale. The trip surfaced opportunities Rethink Carbon is still working through.
That kind of market intelligence unfiltered, first-hand, from people actively working at scale, compresses months of desk research into days. For a founder still figuring out where their product fits globally, that acceleration matters. It sharpens the roadmap, surfaces assumptions worth questioning, and often opens doors that cold outreach alone wouldn't. Techscaler's International Missions programme created the conditions for exactly that.
Singapore opened doors with Rethink Carbon returning with active opportunities in Southeast Asian markets that the team is still pursuing, applying the same careful, preparation-led approach Zoë brought to the trip itself.
Back home, the company is gearing up for the launch of Rethink Codes, its platform designed to streamline the validation and verification process for woodland and peatland carbon projects under the UK's Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code. It's infrastructure for an entire market segment, built to increase transparency, reduce administrative friction, and give investors greater confidence in nature-based carbon projects.
Rethink Carbon now offers three distinct products alongside bespoke development and consultancy services, supported by the Scottish Government, South of Scotland Enterprise, and CENSIS.
Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, gave Rethink Carbon not just access to an international market. But it also gave Zoë the space and the structure to look beyond the day-to-day and think about where the company fits in a global conversation about climate, land and carbon.
For founders in niche, high-impact sectors, where the audience is specialist and the stakes are real, that kind of targeted, programme-led support makes a measurable difference.
Follow Rethink Carbon on LinkedIn for updates on the Rethink Codes platform launch and the company's international expansion.
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