What is the problem that Persefoni is addressing, and what are its core use cases?

Persefoni is a climate management and accounting platform, or CMAP. The company's been around for about two years. Today, it's about 250 people, mostly remote, headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. We raised a Series B in October of last year that was $101 million. 

We're certainly still in the scale-up phase, but the team got started with one pretty clear goal in mind. Carbon accounting has historically been a pretty manual process, done by consultants on spreadsheets, and thus pretty limited to the largest companies that had resources to spend on that. We’re moving it to being software-based and building “the ERP for carbon.”

Today, there are really two core use cases that we're in the market with. 

One use case is surveying a company that wants to calculate its carbon footprint. It's pretty simple. They want to calculate their carbon footprint in line with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard, but they’re looking for a software solution to do it. That could be a company calculating its footprint for the first time, and they want to use software, or it could be a company that's been calculating its footprint for years, but they've been doing it manually, and they want to move software. 

The second use case is calculating the footprints of investment portfolios. That could be stocks, bonds, private equity investments, real estate, infrastructure projects, finance, commercial mortgages, or motor vehicle loans. 

That's being done in alignment with a standard called the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials or PCAF for short, which is a subsidiary standard under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which governs the calculation of this area of financed emission, so carbon footprint from an investment portfolio.

These are two connected but slightly different use cases with slightly different goals. 

A company might want to calculate their footprint because they're required to by regulation, because they want to differentiate from their competitors, or because it's important to their brand. 

An investor might want to calculate their footprint because they're required to by regulation, which is increasingly happening, but also because they want to show their investors, their stakeholders, that they're taking climate change seriously, that they're taking action on carbon emissions.