What is the time and cost commitment of traditional carbon accounting, and how does Persefoni improve upon it?

What it looks like today is you would go to a company, and you'd have a conversation with them about their operations to understand the components of their footprint that might be relevant. That could be their facilities, parts of their supply chain, business, travel, employee commuting—all these different areas that can generate a footprint. 

Then you would go from area to area, aggregating data from those business units so that you can start turning it into a carbon footprint.

That still has to happen. You can't replace that piece. Carbon footprint, at its core, is still a data-based challenge. You have to go to stakeholders across the company to gather data that can help you turn it into a carbon footprint. But what used to happen is then a consultant would take that data and they would match it up with what's called an emissions factor. That means taking that gallon of fuel, that kilowatt-hour of electricity, that pound of cotton, and then turning it into metric tons of CO2 equivalent. 

There are a couple of calculations that happen in between, but I'm simplifying.

That was the domain of the consultant. They would go find the data from the company. They would find the emission factors. They would help complete the calculations. They would roll that all up. 

That's something that can be replaced by software. At Persefoni, we built the software to contain both the calculations necessary to turn what's called activity data from the company into carbon footprint and also the emissions factor.

Historically, the SEC’s research shows that the cost of carbon accounting—when you include the direct cost and the labor costs—was somewhere between $490,000-$650,000

While that's not the largest cost on a Fortune 500 company's income statement, that is a significant cost when you start thinking about middle-market companies.

As you can drive down the cost of that carbon accounting process with software, that's how you can really make it a lot more accessible to small and medium businesses. 

We're doing our part on that as well. We've announced that this year, we'll be releasing a free version of the Persefoni platform, which is targeted toward small and medium businesses. Sometimes, we jokingly say it's a TurboTax-like experience. We think that's going to be really important to enable those thousands and thousands of companies over the next decade that will need to calculate their footprint.