Houston investors have seeded an Austin-based company developing a platform to boost corporate sustainability.
P6 Technologies announced the $3.25 million seed round this week. Houston-based Goose Capital led the round, which was also supported by Artemis Energy Partners — the advisory and investment firm founded by Bobby Tudor, former chair of the bank Tudor, Pickering and Holt Co. Tudor is also a member of Goose Capital.
Other local investors in the round include Veritec Ventures and Tupper Lake Partners, according to P6’s announcement.
Terms of the deal saw Tudor join the board of P6 Technologies as a director. Paal Kibsgaard, former CEO of oil field services giant Schlumberger Ltd. (NYSE: SLB) and managing partner of Veritec, also joined the P6 board.
"P6 has the right approach and is going to make a step-change improvement to how product-level carbon intensity and (greenhouse gas) emissions are tracked today,” Tudor said in the announcement.
The funding will be used to bring P6’s primary product, its Life Cycle Assessment enterprise software platform, to market. The LCA platform is intended to help fossil fuel-based companies comply with regulations on carbon intensity around the globe.
The seed round follows another recent investment by Artemis into San Francisco-based Puloli, a company specializing in real-time emissions monitoring. Although the exact amount of funding Puloli received was not disclosed, Tudor also joined that company’s board of directors.
Artemis was founded in 2022 after Tudor retired from TPH. His other recent efforts in the energy transition space in Houston include chairing the Houston Energy Transition Initiative, which was launched by the Greater Houston Partnership in 2021 following analysis and recommendations from McKinsey and Co. as well as various nonprofits and business leaders.
Tudor is one of several business leaders in Houston’s energy sector to highlight a need for established capital to progress the energy transition both locally and worldwide. During CERAWeek 2021, Tudor estimated that $2 trillion would be needed annually to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. He also said renewables projects would need to deliver more in returns to interest investors.
Meanwhile, notable companies Goose Capital has invested in include Houston-based Syzygy Plasmonics, which develops chemical reactor platform technology using light as a catalyst. Goose invested in multiple rounds for Syzygy, including its $23.9 million Series B round in 2021.
Energy transition startups in Houston will have new leadership to interact with after Somerville, Massachusetts-based climate tech incubator Greentown Labs — which has a Houston location — hired Kevin Knobloch as its new CEO and Timmeko Moore Love as its first-ever Houston general manager.
Love told Houston Inno in an interview that corporate venture arms that are looking to partner with the incubator have to be ready to embrace companies at earlier stages of fundraising, such as seed and pre-seed rounds.
