HeavyFinance, a European climate tech investment marketplace, has gained the European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSP) licence to accelerate its financial service expansion in Europe.

This comes following the news of the freshly formed Climate Tech Supercluster, which debuted at London Tech Week with aims to accelerate European Climate Tech hotspots and spearhead developments of clean technologies.

For several years, one of the largest hurdles faced by crowdfunding platforms seeking to offer their services across borders has been the lack of regulations and diverging licensing requirements across the European Union, resulting in high operational and compliance costs, and in turn prevented many from scaling effectively.

The ECSP licence now provides easier access to the European market, while laying down a set of unified rules for investor protection, transparency, and operating processes. ECSP also allows FinTech marketplaces to list securities from farm owners looking to raise up to €5 million for transition toward more sustainable agriculture practices.

Laimonas Noreika, Founder of HeavyFinance comments: "A unified regulation of FinTech marketplaces is a big step forward for Europe in increasing the access to capital for small and medium sized businesses. It also makes the whole market more transparent and safer, as all platforms must be compliant with the regulation by November 2023."

The Climate Tech space is developing rapidly and achieving such a licence will leverage efforts to improve sustainable practices developed throughout the supply chain, including providing farmers with regenerative agriculture practices, and guide businesses on what they can do to help reduce carbon emissions."

Last year, it was reported that crowdfunding increased by 154 per cent for Climate Tech businesses as people are becoming more environmentally-conscious.

The licence will ultimately bolster HeavyFinance's progress of removing one gigaton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050, and spearhead the launch of Green Loans, a debt instrument that enables retail and institutional investors to get returns on the sale of CO2 removal credits generated from European farmland.