SanchaliPal

Your wallet is a climate tool. Sanchali Pal figured that out first.

Commons - the Oakland-based app that reads your bank statements and translates them into a carbon footprint - started with a spreadsheet. Not a pitch deck. Not a VC introduction. A spreadsheet. Sanchali Pal, Princeton economics class of 2012, watched Food, Inc. her senior year, felt the usual jolt of alarm, and did something unusual: she didn't change her Tumblr bio. She opened a spreadsheet and started logging.

She kept logging for six years. Through Dalberg consulting offices in India and Ethiopia. Through an MBA at Harvard Business School. Through a two-month stint at Tesla. The spreadsheet went everywhere she did. And somewhere in those six years of personal carbon accounting, the insight crystallized - sustainable living doesn't cost more. For Sanchali, it saved $2,000 a year and, by her own account, improved her health. The problem wasn't motivation. The problem was friction. Spreadsheets don't scale.

Commons (launched as Joro in 2020, rebranded in 2023) solves the spreadsheet problem by connecting to your bank account and doing the math automatically. Every transaction - groceries, gas, fast fashion, a subscription to something with a carbon offset disclaimer in the footer - gets scored. Brands get rated by experts for genuine sustainability versus greenwashing. Users earn rewards for making better choices. Communities form around collective challenges. The invisible becomes visible, in real time, without a pivot table.

By 2022, the app had tripled its monthly active users. It earned a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies list, was featured as Apple's App of the Day, and closed a $10M Series A with an investor roster that included Sequoia Capital, Jay-Z's venture arm Arrive, Norrsken VC (founded by Klarna's Niklas Adalberth), and Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. Colin Kaepernick joined the advisory board. When your climate app attracts both venture capital royalty and cultural icons, you've found something real.

From Addis Ababa to Oakland - the long route to a startup

Sanchali grew up outside Boston, the daughter of immigrants. Visits to extended family in India and a period spent volunteering in an Indian slum introduced her early to what resource scarcity looks like from the inside. Years later, she watched that same climate precarity play out at scale while working on sustainable development projects in East Africa - where the communities most vulnerable to climate change have contributed the least to it.

In 2015, Dalberg sent her to Addis Ababa with one colleague and an instruction to open an office. She did. Within a year, the office had five staff and $1M in annual revenue. This is relevant: Sanchali Pal does not wait for ideal conditions before starting.

After Tesla - where she spent two months on market access strategy for the Powerwall and Powerpack, enough to understand the clean energy market but not enough to cure the itch - she enrolled at Harvard Business School. Her senior year project became Joro. Her pre-seed investor was Bryan Schreier at Sequoia Capital, a Princeton alumnus she reached via a cold email. First-time solo female founder. No co-founder. No warm intro. The cold email worked.

Joro becomes Commons: because "climate change needs a rebrand"

In March 2023, Joro became Commons. The name change wasn't cosmetic. It was a thesis. Joro had built an audience of climate-alarmed individuals who wanted personal carbon accountability. Commons expanded the frame: this isn't about individual guilt. It's about collective consumer power shaping markets.

The rebrand came with a public argument: climate change itself has a branding problem. It sounds distant, technical, geologic. Commons insists it's "real-life, human, present, and solvable." The app reflects that posture - financial management and climate action as the same gesture, not competing priorities.

The product under both names operates on a deceptively simple premise: over one-third of Americans identify as "climate-alarmed" and want to act. They don't know how. Commons answers the question by making every transaction legible - here's what you spent, here's what it cost the planet, here's what you could do differently, here are 40,000 other people doing the same thing. Carbon tracking as a community sport, not a homework assignment.

Four decisions that built a climate tech company

$14.7M to make climate action the default

What solo founding actually looks like

Sanchali built Commons without a co-founder. In a startup culture that frequently flags solo founding as a red flag, she's been characteristically direct about what that requires: builder networks you're honest with, decision frameworks you can apply at speed, and clarity on what you're optimizing for beyond the financial return.

Her framework for big decisions has a useful specificity to it: identify the core uncertainty, do rapid targeted research, consult people who actually know the domain, then trust your instincts on the call. She's described maintaining multiple founder networks - not for networking, but for "questions I can't ask elsewhere." There's a social support infrastructure running underneath the product discipline.

On hiring and culture: "You have to find people you're willing to be honest with, and who will do the same with you." For a company whose product is built on making people honest about their consumption habits, this reads as more than a management aphorism. The internal culture and the product are running on the same logic.

Commons has 35 employees. Its app connects to thousands of banks, rates 50,000+ brands, and has attracted enough users to generate meaningful collective impact data - the kind that's interesting to brands, to policymakers, and to anyone trying to understand where consumer climate sentiment is actually moving. The spreadsheet scaled.

A decade in motion

The receipts

Things worth knowing about Sanchali Pal

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