Planet Metrics releases carbon monitoring software

San Bruno, Calif.-based Planet Metrics has spent the past two years building its carbon information management software and collecting carbon and energy data from around the world. Today, the company is bringing it all together, unveiling the beta release of its Rapid Carbon Modeling solution.

“We’re helping corporations in consumer packaged goods, retail and manufacturing understand the carbon associated with everything they make,” Planet Metrics founder and CEO Andy Leventhal told the Cleantech Group.

The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution tracks a company’s carbon footprint, with a focus on providing metrics to help the company optimize its supply chain, Leventhal said. Customers input their own data into the system or can use proxy data supplied by Planet Metrics.

Planet Metrics has been funded with $2.3 million from angel investors and venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Leventhal said Planet Metrics expects to begin raising an additional $3 million to $5 million soon to expand its sales, marketing, and development, and to grow the team. The company currently has eight employees.

Through the software program, energy sustainability managers and product management executives can create various views that reflect commodity price, potential substitutions, carbon cost, as well as before and after analytics. The data is organized into virtual libraries, offering scientific analysis as well as a heat map, which organizes a company’s biggest carbon emission categories from biggest to smallest. The visualization process also allows the user to look at different metrics in one view.

It takes about 30 days for the model to be set up for a company, Leventhal said, depending on the complexity of the design.

“What we do is help companies understand the embodied energy in everything they make so they can make better decisions,” Leventhal said.

Director of Product Management Jørgen Vos said Planet Metrics is already helping one nonpaying customer do just that. San Francisco, Calif.-based Method is an environmentally-friendly cleaning product company using the software.

“The company is looking at packaging materials and plastics they use to see if they can change where it comes from, what kinds of materials they use and if there’s a lower cost associated with making changes,” Vos said.

Vos said Method plans to have its next generation of products on shelves in a year.

“The learning they have gleamed from our software will be embedded in those products,” Vos said.

Leventhal said cost savings will most likely be achieved, but Method is in the beginning stages of executing the process and hasn’t made any product changes yet. Planet Metrics makes money from an upfront fee that varies, in addition to an approximately $150,000 annual subscription to the software. The company is already bringing in revenue.

But he said not every customer is going to have an immediate financial return on investment; rather, they’ll be provided with new strategies they can deploy and scenarios they can run.

Planet Metrics is targeting companies around the world with its solution and has a handful of paying U.S.-based companies as well as a Canadian customer, although Leventhal wouldn’t name them. A 2008 report indicated that a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system could generate revenue for Canadian companies of at least C$50 billion ($44.5 billion) per year by 2020 (see Carbon tax could pay off for Canada).

The CEO cited other companies including Gap, Target, Safeway, Walmart, PepsiCo., Coca-Cola, automotive companies as well as apparel businesses like Timberline and Patagonia that could benefit from the software.

Planet Metrics is targeting large companies in which the software could offer significant benefits. Vos indicated that the software is applicable to smaller companies, but larger companies typically have better organized data.

Should companies start being charged for carbon emissions, Leventhal said, it would drive demand for products made by companies such as Planet Metrics.

“This is really going to be cost driven," Leventhal said. "Companies don’t have any idea what their commodity and price risks are throughout their business. If there was a carbon tax in place tomorrow, they don’t know if they would be buyers or sellers of carbon.”

Leventhal said Plant Metrics currently has a “greenfield opportunity” because there isn’t a lot of competition. He highlighted a few potential competitors working in the same space including Hara Environmental and Energy Management, which came out of stealth earlier this month with funding from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (see Kleiner Perkins hatches stealthy software startup Hara).

Solutions for carbon management and the creation of carbon credits have been getting the attention of venture capitalists, with San Francisco’s Carbonflow, Victoria, British Columbia's carbonetworks, and Sterling, Va.-based Clear Standards pulling in funding for their software suites (see Growing market for carbon software).

Carbonflow has been developing software to lower the cost and time it takes to create a credit, while carbonetworks provides software to manage emissions inventories. In 2008, Carbonflow closed its Series A round with plans to begin selling its software for carbon-trading markets (see CarbonFlow gets $1M to close Series A).

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