A million dollars isn’t cool

Welcome to the Strawman. When it comes to Climate, we spill the tea like a sleepy Barista. Stay plugged in.

Today we’re back talking about a very large funding round. IntegrityNext (I know, what a bizarre name) has announced a $109M equity investment. In other words, venture capital investors have invested this amount in to the business in return for minority ownership. While we’ve been talking about billions of dollars of incentives, for startups this is still a huge amount of money.

IntegrityNext describes itself as:

So what does this mean?

They help companies track the ESG impact (Environment, Social, Governance) of their suppliers. If you’re in construction and you’re making homes you can plug in the information of the company that provides your bricks, your concrete, and your other materials. This helps you figure out your scope three emissions. You can analyse them, look for replacements and even see where you might need to make offsets - kinda like a control tower for you business emissions.

And why would companies pay for this?

IntegrityNext has 200 enterprise customers and their database tracks over 1 million suppliers across 190 countries. These customers are paying upwards of $60,000 a year. All because they care of course! Wait no, only the Strawman truly cares. We all know businesses don’t give a crap. They move slow like glaciers. Melting ones at that.

The main reason businesses are paying for this is because regulation is clamping down on scope three emissions. They need to make sure they’re tracking these emissions, making relevant carbon offsets, and staying compliant with regulation. From 2024, companies in the EU with more than 1,000 employees have to partake in mandatory ESG reporting. We know corporations love to stay compliant!

Beyond this, there’s also strong stakeholder pressure outside of regulators. More and more customers are factoring ESG into their decision making and the prevalence of scope three tracking means even business to business corporations could be challenged if they don’t get their emissions under control. As they say, one mans emissions are another another man’s scope three. Ok, maybe I got that one wrong…

Wait wasn’t there a funding winter? 

Yeah but that winter is kind of like the 2 degrees thing, it’s an average. Big companies exist and they’ll continue to raise like they used to. This is one of the biggest trends in climate and investors love putting their money where regulation is forcing businesses to go.

Stay frosty,

The Strawman