Sustain.Life announces $16m seed investment

Sustainability platform Sustain.Life has announced a $16 million (€15.36 million) seed investment, with Irish co-founder Mike Hanrahan leading the round with Tapestry VC.

The round, which also had participation from Active Impact Investments, Kompas, Agya Ventures and Seyen Capital, will use the money to accelerate its hiring, software development and customer acquisition.

Founded by Mr Hanrahan, founder of Jet. com, Annalee Bloomfield, Alyssa Rade and Patrick Campagnano, the company is designed to help SMEs to take climate action that will have an impact.

The platform makes it easier and more affordable to measure, manage and report carbon emissions and environmental impact, giving teams without expertise the ability to measure environmental impact from internal operations, manage their emissions through operational changes in energy, water and waste, and reduce their footprint, and report their progress to customers, investors and employees.

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Sustainability programmes

“Many major corporations have the resources to invest in sustainability initiatives, but most companies lack the resources to launch successful sustainability programmes. That is why we set out to build a platform that would be more accessible from a usability and cost perspective,” Mr Hanrahan said.

Mr Hanrahan, originally from Co Wexford, previously founded ecommerce site Jet.com, and oversaw its sale to Walmart. Sustain.Life was founded after Mr Hanhrahan led Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab, with Ms Bloomfield as senior director, head of product and customer experience, and Mr Campagnano as head of engineering. The team brought in ESG expert Alyssa Rade to serve as the company's chief sustainability officer. The platform was launched in November 2021.

Climate change

“Together, small and medium-sized enterprises constitute a significant amount of the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. Today, most of these companies lack the expertise and resources to take climate action,” Ms Rade said. “Not only does inaction have negative consequences for the planet, it has negative business impacts for these companies too, including higher costs and greater risk.”

Cofounder and managing partner of Tapestry VC Patrick Murphy said Sustain.Life was bringing unique insights on real problems experienced by real businesses which wanted to manage climate accounting.

“The carbon accounting and offsets industry is shifting from a marketing exercise and cottage industry to a key bastion in the global fight against climate change, accelerated by a recent industry and regulatory reawakening on the issue,” he said.

It has won customers across sectors such as food and beverage, electric vehicles and fintech, including electronic trading platform Interactive Brokers, software company Avetta and the Sustainable Cannabis Coalition.