Climate tech SaaS start-up Persefoni raises $101m in Series B round

Climate management and accounting start-up Persefoni has raised $101 million in a Series B financing round.

Persefoni CEO and co-founder Kentaro Kawamori

The firm’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform allows enterprises and financial institutions to manage their carbon inventory and transactions in order to meet climate disclosure requirements.

Prelude Ventures and The Rise Fund led the round with participation from new investors Clearvision Ventures, Parkway Ventures and Bain, among others.

Existing investors including NGP Energy Technology Partners and Sallyport Investments also participated.

Persefoni claims the round is the largest in climate tech history for a SaaS company and brings the total capital raised by the firm to $114.2 million.

The cash will be used to expand outside the existing 18 US states and eight countries in which the company already has a presence.

Persefoni CEO and co-founder Kentaro Kawamori says: “Carbon and climate disclosures will be the biggest compliance market since the advent of Sarbanes Oxley and GDPR, but with even greater complexity.”

Kawamori claims the market is rife with data and software solutions that create new proprietary methodologies every day, and customers are “exhausted with that approach” and are instead “looking for a solution they know was purpose-built for the enterprise first”.