Building Anthill's Green Fund Investment Thesis

Anthill wanted to explore carbon credit markets as a potential fund thesis across India, UAE, and Southeast Asia. Abhinav was given an open-ended research mandate with no live deal forcing a decision and no deadline creating urgency.

He started broad. Carbon credits are certificates representing a reduction or removal of greenhouse gas emissions, and voluntary markets let companies buy them to offset their own emissions outside of government compliance schemes. Before evaluating any specific opportunity, he needed to understand how the market actually functioned: who issues credits, who verifies them, who trades them, and who buys.

Mapping Three Genuinely Different Markets

The hard part was not finding information. It was that each of the three jurisdictions operated differently, and there was no single playbook he could apply across all three.

India was still building out its domestic regulatory framework, running compliance and voluntary markets in parallel. The UAE was positioning itself as a regional carbon trading hub with its own registry and verification standards. Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Singapore, leaned heavily on nature-based credits, largely forestry and land use, with different quality and pricing dynamics depending on the country.

He built each jurisdiction's analysis separately, mapping registries, pricing mechanisms, how credit prices varied by project type and geography, and where projects were heading given long-term demand signals.

Structuring the Output

He structured the thesis geographically rather than by credit type because geography was the primary driver of difference across the three markets. Credit type was not a separate axis; it was part of what made each market distinct. Southeast Asia's market leaned on nature-based credits precisely because of its geography and land use profile. The UAE's standardization push was a function of its ambition to be a trading hub.

The output gave Anthill's leadership a structured view of where the investable opportunity actually sat, which jurisdiction had the most credible near-term angle, and which risks, including price volatility and verification quality, needed to be underwritten into any decision.