GreenPlaces Secures $4M in Seed Funding led by Felicis

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Oct 13, 2022, 12:45 ET

RALEIGH, N.C., Oct. 13, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- GreenPlaces, the "sustainability for all" climate platform, announced that it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Felicis, with participation from Bull City Venture Partners and a number of high-profile angel investors including Howard Lerman & Brian Distelberger (co-founders of Yext), Scot Wingo (founder of ChannelAdvisor), Jesse Lipson (founder of ShareFile), Todd Olson (founder of Pendo), Kyle Porter (Founder of SalesLoft), and Baker Shogry (former head of Product at Plaid). GreenPlaces has raised $5 million to date and will be using this fresh round of capital to double the size of the team over the next year.

GreenPlaces integrates with hundreds of common tools like Rippling, Workday, ADP, Netsuite, and Quickbooks, making sustainability reporting seamless, accurate, and less time intensive than other platforms. It connects to nearly all US energy, water, and natural gas utilities to give businesses full visibility into their emissions with half the effort. The platform analyzes the data it collects, and combines that with industry expertise to make personalized recommendations for businesses which allows companies the tedious process of manual data entry by connecting tools they already use.

"We realized that everyone was building sustainability tools for the world's largest companies, but no one was offering a solution for the 99% of businesses that don't live on the Fortune 500," said founder and CEO Alex Lassiter. "Products built for Wal-Mart, or Goldman Sachs aren't going to work for most SaaS companies. Likewise, they also won't work for a law firm, logistics company, hotel, or restaurant chain. We realized these resource-constrained businesses make up nearly 70% of global emissions, and they weren't being served. These businesses need an easy-to-implement solution that does more than generate a carbon footprint. They need a platform that creates personalized recommendations on what to do, and tools to engage employees and customers – they needed all the things a sustainability team would do."

While sustainability has become an expectation, and even a requirement, for most businesses, the vast majority lack the resources to reach their sustainability goals. Lassiter, who previously co-founded Gather (acquired by Vista Equity), believes that the carbon accounting solutions in place today don't work for these businesses. He believes these tools are too labor-intensive and difficult for most businesses to adopt.

In addition to reporting, the GreenPlaces platform also generates personalized recommendations and insights for businesses to improve their sustainability metrics. For example, it comes pre-built with ESG policies that clients can review and adopt to meet requirements and reduce their overall footprint without having the legal cost and headache of drawing these policies up from scratch.

GreenPlaces also helps clients engage their employees in customers. They connect to tools like Slack to post updates, progress and climate competitions, and even generate a sustainability page that clients can embed on their website to keep customers updated on sustainability progress. These sustainability pages can be customized to a brand, and kept up to date without engaging a developer or web designer.

"We're so excited to back Alex and the GreenPlaces team," said Viviana Faga, General Partner at Felicis. "GreenPlaces makes it incredibly easy for companies of all sizes to understand their carbon emissions to meet corporate sustainability goals and is quickly becoming the source of truth for sustainability activity. The platform comes with ESG policies built-in that companies can adopt, but is also extremely flexible, allowing for connecting to 150+ APIs. We hope all companies become GreenPlaces."

GreenPlaces has already signed over one hundred customers from various industries including Flatiron Health, JustWorks, SalesLoft, bartaco, Thuma, Yext, and more.

About GreenPlaces

GreenPlaces is the clear path for corporate sustainability. GreenPlaces sustainability platform is easy-to-implement, and helps businesses gain visibility into carbon emissions, improve their metrics and reach sustainability goals with ease. They serve a wide variety of industries ranging from software companies to professional services to restaurants, retail and hospitality. GreenPlaces combines industry expertise, with simple to implement software to make sustainability achievable for all businesses. The company is based in Raleigh, NC and has employees across the US. Learn more at www.greenplaces.com

About Felicis

Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. Felicis focuses on early stage investments and currently manages over $2.1B in capital across 8 funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 41 companies valued at $1B+. More than 91 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen (IPO), Credit Karma (acq by Intuit), Cruise (acq by General Motors), Fitbit (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Meraki (acq by Cisco), Ring (acq by Amazon), and Shopify (IPO). The firm is based in Menlo Park, CA. Learn more at www.felicis.com.

SOURCE GreenPlaces