Fresh Ink: Welcoming GreenPlaces, your virtual Chief Sustainability Officer
The Ink: GreenPlaces’ $13M Series A funding
Investors: Annie Kadavy, Medha Agarwal, and Meera Clark
The Scoop: GreenPlaces is a software platform for managing a company’s sustainability measurement, reporting, verification, and offsetting / reduction efforts. The platform enables its customers to automate their sustainability data, reduce their environmental impact, and reach climate and business goals with ease.
While software in this space has traditionally focused on the largest businesses in the world (think the Fortune 500), GreenPlaces is purpose-built for the broad base of companies (think those with 100–10,000 employees) who comprise the majority of global emissions but today lack sufficient resources to dedicate towards sustainability. These companies are only now being forced to think about their emissions and sustainability practices because their investors, customers, and regulators are increasingly demanding it — and GreenPlaces is meeting this growing need as their friction-free virtual Chief Sustainability Officer.
What They’re Tackling: Today, 83% of global emissions come from outside of the Fortune 500 and this segment of the market is seeing increasing scrutiny surrounding their ESG and climate related practices as a result of greater employee and consumer pressure, greater pressure from corporate customers, and greater regulatory pressure at municipal, state, and federal levels.
Double-clicking on this trend, with >60% of the Fortune 500 expressing a commitment to addressing the climate crisis and >40% of the Fortune 500 setting explicit Net Zero targets, these larger category captains are increasingly leaning on their service providers and supply chain partners (think their law firms, marketing agencies, materials suppliers, and more) to directly report back on their emissions footprints so that these multinationals can more accurately account for their Scope 3 footprints.
Moving forward, if you want to work with large corporations in any sort of commercial capacity or aspire to their revenue scale (and the associated regulatory reporting requirements), you are going to need to both track and report on your emissions footprint and sustainability practices.
The Deep Dive: We believe that similar to what we’ve seen with other compliance trends like GDPR and SOC II, the vast majority of the market needs a simple, prescriptive, set-it-and-forget-it solution for sustainability — and that’s what GreenPlaces offers. In contrast to more bespoke, heavy, and custom tools, GreenPlaces is easy to implement, highly prescriptive, and gives clients dynamic tools that they can seamlessly share with their investors, customers, and employees at the click of a button.
With GreenPlaces, companies are able to digitally connect their data, leveraging GreenPlaces hundreds of API integrations, and automatically calculate their emissions footprint across a highly customizable set of criteria (think by location, vendor, energy source, and more). Leveraging a company’s emissions data and its own proprietary library of vetted policies, GreenPlaces both generates a customized company “Trust” page that is aggregated and searchable for all interested counterparties and offers recommendations for both emissions and cost savings based on company specific data — a huge win-win in our books.
As GreenPlaces integrates itself deeper into both companies’ sustainability and business operations consideration sets, we have high hopes for the ancillary opportunities that GreenPlaces’ initial wedge unlocks.
The Investor Perspective: Having gone deep, deep down this rabbit hole over the past few years, when we met Alex, it was excitement at first sight. For those of you who haven’t met Alex, he is a force and, more importantly, deeply understands this diversified customer base who has historically been overlooked and misunderstood by Silicon Valley. Alex sold his last company, Gather, to Vista in 2017, and got a valuable crash course in scaling best-in-class SaaS go-to-market teams. Having sold the Gather product into 10K customers who look quite similar to his current partners at GreenPlaces, Alex developed unparalleled customer empathy and rapport — as evidenced by the number of customers who have chosen to invest in GreenPlaces including the founders of Pendo, Yext, Salesloft, bartaco, Hodinkee, and more. 24 months in, Alex has been able to recruit a rockstar early team from the likes of Crowdstrike and Yextand recently brought on Corinne Hanson as VP of Sustainability . This full time force is supported by a brilliant bench of advisors like the CEO of Subway and the Director of Global Nutrition & Sustainability at Taco Bell. We’re honored to be joining such an incredible crew.
At Redpoint, we’re thrilled to announce our Series A investment in GreenPlaces, where we’re joining a group of standout Angels and institutions including our friends at Felicis. Read more about the fundraising announcement here — and if you’re excited about exploring a career in climate, check out their open roles here!
