A climate startup based in Lafayette has raised new funding and expanded its suite of services to include a renewable energy marketplace.
WattCarbon raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by True Ventures, the company announced on Wednesday, bringing its total funding to $6 million.
The company previously raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round a little over a year ago from Village Global, Looking Glass, Jetstream, Not-Boring Capital, Keiki Capital and several angel investors.
CEO McGee Young co-founded the company in 2021 with senior engineer Keith Weiss, head of finance and operations Aaron Gubin and former-CTO Hassan Shaban.
When the company launched, it offered property owners 24/7 emissions monitoring by measuring a building's energy consumption and matching that to data from public utility grids.
Renewable energy is not always available around the clock, so utility providers often have to switch to conventional fossil fuel sources of power during peak hours or when resources like solar and wind energy are not available.
By tapping into publicly available data about the energy mix in real time, WattCarbon is able to more accurately assess the emissions of a property.
However, the team realized that its customers were frustrated by a lack of options for actually increasing their renewable energy usage in order to reach "net zero" emissions goals.
"We realized that it was one thing to be able to calculate emissions in a more accurate way," Young told me, "but then what do you do?"
Young was also wary of the potential for companies to greenwash their energy consumption by purchasing carbon offsets — something that looks good on paper but allows companies to pat themselves on the back while not actually reducing carbon emissions in any meaningful way.
What they came up with is a renewable energy marketplace with three distinct layers. Companies that purchase renewable energy from WattCarbon can do any of the following:
- Purchase renewable energy from regional providers through WattCarbon's “virtual power plant” network
- Sell renewable energy back to grid operators.
- Generate carbon offset credits by reducing a property’s emissions.
The goal is to encourage real reductions in emissions while offering more sources of renewable energy.
WattCarbon has seven regional renewable energy partners in its virtual power plant network that provide coverage across the West Coast, Texas, the Midwest and the East Coast. It will continue adding regional providers of renewable energy to get to full national coverage this year, Young told me.
"Our vision is for any company, organization, community, or individual to be able to match every kilowatt of electricity consumed, every hour of the year, with an equivalent kilowatt produced or reduced by a new energy resource through a private Virtual Power Plant," Young wrote in a blog post. "It will also be possible to match every therm of natural gas consumed with an equivalent reduction coming from an electrification project nearby."
