A Forest Fire Can Retroactively Invalidate a Carbon Credit You Already Paid For

Chris Slater is, in his own words, an insurance lifer — over 20 years in the industry, starting at a large UK corporate before joining the founding team of Moneysupermarket-era direct-to-consumer home and auto insurer Moneysupermarket. That taste of building something new pushed him to co-found Simply Business in 2004, one of the earliest UK insurtechs, which grew over 13 years into the largest online small commercial insurance provider in the UK — roughly a million customers, a couple hundred million in revenue, an eventual US expansion, and an acquisition by Travelers in 2017. He stayed on as an advisor through 2020-2021, then spent several years in venture, investing in and advising other companies, before stumbling onto the idea of insuring carbon credits at the start of the prior year.

Yaron Ben-Zvi built Haven Life, one of the first direct-to-consumer life insurance companies, grew it, sold it into MassMutual, and continued running it in-house for another seven or eight years. After leaving Haven at the end of 2022 and taking time off, he set out looking specifically for a way to combine his insurtech background with climate work — and met Chris and the Oka team while getting up to speed on the space.

In Episode 108 of InsurTechTalk, Chris, Yaron, and I covered why carbon credits carry real, insurable risk, how Oka built a full-stack Lloyd’s syndicate from scratch rather than fronting through an existing carrier, and the specific mechanics of reversal and invalidation risk in the voluntary carbon market.

About Chris Slater and Yaron Ben-Zvi

Chris Slater is the CEO and co-founder of Oka, the Carbon Insurance Company. He previously co-founded Simply Business in 2004, growing it into the UK’s largest online small commercial insurance provider before its 2017 acquisition by Travelers, and spent several subsequent years in venture investing before founding Oka in late 2023. Yaron Ben-Zvi is Oka’s COO. He founded and built Haven Life, one of the earliest direct-to-consumer life insurance companies, growing it both independently and later inside MassMutual over roughly a decade, before joining Oka in 2023.

Why Carbon Credits Need Insurance at All

The carbon credit market exists to let large corporations offset emissions they can’t yet directly reduce, buying credits tied to projects (reforestation, methane capture, and similar) that remove or avoid carbon. Chris’s framing of the underlying problem: the market is relatively opaque, faced real credibility criticism over the prior year regarding project quality, and — critically — the credits themselves carry genuine, underinsured risk.

Oka’s product addresses two categories of that risk directly:

• Reversal risk — physical events that undo a credit’s validity after the fact. His example: a forest-based carbon credit projected to sequester carbon over ten years, where the forest later burns down, is illegally logged, or is otherwise physically destroyed — retroactively invalidating the environmental benefit the credit represented
• Invalidation risk — methodological failures, such as an “additionality” problem, where the project didn’t actually remove the carbon it claimed to, independent of any physical event

Both risk categories directly threaten the buyer’s investment and their public net-zero claims, and — until Oka — there was no dedicated insurance mechanism addressing either.

The First Full-Stack Carbon Insurance Carrier

Oka’s positioning is specific: other new entrants in the space have generally built products focused on the operational side of a carbon project — funding, project initiation, delivery of credits. Oka is the first company insuring the credit itself — giving buyers direct recourse if a credit they’ve already purchased becomes impaired or invalidated after the fact.

Just as notably, Oka built as a genuinely full-stack insurance carrier — controlling the pen (binding authority), designing the product, setting the rating, and settling claims directly — rather than distributing another carrier’s paper or building purely as an MGA fronting through someone else’s balance sheet.

The Origin Story: A Land Contract That Raised a Question

The idea traces back to a specific, concrete trigger: Oka’s executive chair, serial entrepreneur James Hall, had a contract to convert a piece of property into forest specifically to issue carbon credits. Reviewing that contract, Chris started asking questions nobody in the deal had good answers for — what risks exist for the credits this project would eventually issue, both for the developer/property owner and for whoever eventually bought the credits? Following that question into the broader carbon ecosystem, he found the same pattern everywhere: everyone talked about risk and quality, but there was no actual mechanism to transfer that risk. That gap became Oka’s founding thesis.

Building a Lloyd’s Syndicate From Scratch — In About a Year

The speed and structural ambition of Oka’s build is genuinely unusual, and worth spelling out precisely.

• Oka closed an oversubscribed $7 million seed round in December-January, backed by institutional investors Aquiline (their technology fund) — a repeat backer of Chris’s from Simply Business — and First Minute Capital, a European fund with deep founder/climate-tech ties, alongside various family offices
• Rather than fronting through an existing carrier or setting up an offshore captive, Oka chose to build its own Lloyd’s of London syndicate, with an in-house managing agency
• The reasoning: Lloyd’s brings a globally recognized, A-rated brand that gives large US corporate buyers real confidence in the paper behind the policy, and — just as importantly — a global license, letting Oka eventually write business anywhere, not just the US market it started with
• The company launched in January 2023, spent much of the year validating product-market fit and securing purchase commitments, and expected to bind its first policy on January 1, 2024 — meaning the entire regulatory, reinsurance, and licensing build to a bindable full-stack carrier happened in roughly a year, a timeline Chris and Yaron both noted would typically take considerably longer for a genuinely new product category in a new market

Distribution: Embedded at the Point of Sale

Oka’s go-to-market is built around embedding insurance directly into how carbon credits are already sold. Corporate buyers don’t generally source credits directly — they work with intermediaries (Chris named Climate Impact Partners, Carbon Direct, and South Pole as examples) who source or develop projects and package credits to meet a buyer’s stated net-zero requirements. Oka’s product wraps the credit at that point of sale, embedded by the intermediary rather than sold separately to the end buyer.

The value proposition on both sides of that transaction:

• An insured credit should carry a reputational premium over an uninsured one, signaling quality in a market under real scrutiny
• It mitigates the buyer’s own diligence and contract risk — increasingly important as buyers face growing reputational exposure from investing in credits that later turn out to be low-quality or invalidated

Reinsurance and the Claims Mechanism

Because this is a genuinely new risk category with no long-tail loss history, Oka built in reinsurance partnerships from day one — explicitly framed as a shared learning process with reinsurers as claims patterns emerge, rather than assuming Oka alone could underwrite this risk without outside capital backing it at scale, given the projected size of the eventual market (Chris cited third-party estimates ranging from $100 billion to $1 trillion by 2030).

On claims mechanics specifically: carbon credit registries — the governing bodies that issue credits in the first place — serve as the effective judge and jury on whether a credit has been impaired (whether due to a physical reversal event or a methodological invalidation). Oka’s claims process works directly alongside these registries, using their determinations as the basis for settling a claim, rather than adjudicating credit validity independently.

The Two Real Challenges: Education and Market Maturation

Yaron identified the primary near-term challenge as ecosystem education — not just buyers, but sellers, consultants, and thought leaders across the space are only now getting comfortable with the idea that insurance has a role in carbon markets at all, since it’s a genuinely novel application most of the ecosystem hasn’t previously had reason to think through.

The second, more structural challenge: the voluntary carbon market’s rapid growth has produced real headwinds as it matures — increased scrutiny, more sophisticated buyer questions about credit quality, and greater oversight generally. Yaron’s framing is that this maturation, while a genuine challenge, is also precisely the dynamic that makes insurance more relevant, not less — a maturing market with more scrutiny is a market that needs risk transfer mechanisms more, not fewer.

Advice: Stay in the Learning Zone, and Remember It’s Distribution, Not Just Product

Yaron’s advice, reflecting his own unusual move from life insurance into P&C-adjacent carbon insurance: seek out the intersection of genuine domain expertise and continued learning — leveraging what you already know deeply while staying in territory that keeps you excited about adding value in new ways.

Chris offered two distinct pieces of advice. Insurance-specific: after 20-plus years, his single clearest lesson is that it always comes down to distribution — founders (himself included, historically) fall in love with the product rather than the underlying problem, when the actual determining factor in a good insurance business is how easy and efficient you make it for customers to actually buy the thing. General startup advice: surround yourself with the right people — the right team, investors, and advisors — because building a company is very rarely, if ever, about any single individual.

Key Takeaways

• Carbon credits carry two genuinely distinct, underinsured risk categories — reversal risk (physical events invalidating a credit after issuance) and invalidation risk (methodological failures like additionality problems) — and Oka is the first carrier insuring the credit itself rather than just the underlying project
• Oka built as a full-stack carrier via its own Lloyd’s syndicate, choosing global brand credibility and licensing flexibility over fronting through an existing carrier or an offshore captive structure
• The entire build — seed funding, product design, regulatory approval, reinsurance partnerships, and licensing — happened in roughly a year, notably fast for a genuinely new insurance product category
• Distribution is embedded directly at the point of sale through carbon credit intermediaries, wrapping insurance around the credit itself rather than selling separately to end buyers
• Claims determinations rely on the carbon market’s existing registries as the arbiter of whether a credit has been impaired, rather than Oka adjudicating credit validity independently
• Ecosystem education remains the primary near-term barrier — most of the carbon market hasn’t previously had reason to think about insurance as a relevant tool
• A maturing, more scrutinized voluntary carbon market is, in the founders’ view, a market that needs risk transfer mechanisms more urgently, not a market insurance is arriving too late to matter in