Why some of the Triangle’s leading entrepreneurs are investing in this green startup

Triangle companies looking to make their businesses greener are increasingly turning to a Raleigh startup to guide their efforts.

Green Places, a company founded earlier this year, is attempting to simplify the process of going carbon neutral for small- and mid-size companies, helping them determine their overall footprint, then finding strategies to offset them.

Offsetting a company’s carbon footprint can be time consuming and confusing, especially for organizations that don’t have the resources to dedicate an employee to it. But avoiding the issue is no longer sustainable either, said Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ founder and CEO.

One survey found that more than 70% of workers were more likely to work at a company with a strong environmental agenda, Fast Company reported. And consumers, too, are basing more of their buying decisions on the environmental records of companies.

Around a fifth of the world’s largest companies have pledged to become net-zero carbon emitters, Forbes Magazine reported earlier this year. Lassister believes there’s a huge opportunity to help smaller companies make similar pledges.

“It is really hard to run a business and do a good job on something complex like sustainability,” Lassiter said in a telephone interview with The News & Observer. “But businesses are under so much pressure to do better there — from both their customers and their employees.”

How does it work?

Green Places helps companies by first calculating their carbon footprint. Lassiter said the company uses a calculator designed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley that takes into account a variety of factors — from a company’s commuting patterns and airline travel to the amount of storage it keeps on server farms.

The startup then invests in and manages carbon negative projects that will balance out a company’s footprint, from something as simple as planting trees to more complicated investments in wind and solar farms as well as other emerging clean energy technologies.

“For a business that wants to invest in carbon reducing products, we make that turnkey,” Lassiter said.

Investing in carbon-offsetting projects isn’t without pitfalls. Many projects that look good on paper often under deliver or aren’t permanent. Finding trusted partners can be a full-time job that most companies simply don’t have time for.

Lassiter said Green Places works with several third-party companies that help verify carbon projects, including the American Carbon Registry, Verra, Gold Standard and ICROA.

Attracting influential investors

Green Places is the second startup Lassiter has founded. The former Morehead-Cain scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill was, until last year, a co-founder of Gather, an events-management software company based in Atlanta. In 2017, the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners took control of Gather with a $55 million investment, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported.

After Gather, Lassiter moved back to the Triangle and began thinking about what his next venture would be or whether to go back to school. “I wanted to do something that mattered,” Lassiter said.

Green Places, which has raised just short of $1 million in angel funding, is attracting investments from some of the most influential entrepreneurs in the region, including Todd Olson, the CEO of software unicorn Pendo; Jess Lipson, the founder of Levitate; and Scot Wingo, the founder of ChannelAdvisor and Spiffy.

Green Places already has 50 customers, including the restaurant chain Bartaco and the financial services firm East Franklin Capital.

Olson said the startup could gain strong traction with medium-sized businesses that haven’t had the bandwidth to figure out sustainability plans.

“I know a lot of companies desire to be good citizens in their community and want to reduce the impact they have on the environment,” Olson said in an email. “However, most companies don’t have the resources to fund a full-time sustainability leader or team. Green Places provides this as a service, so companies get the benefits much more affordably than doing it yourself.”

Pendo, which has around 600 employees, began working with Green Places earlier this year, and it plans to publicly share a sustainability plan it is building with Green Places. The company said it is on track to offset 7,301 metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of around 1,588 cars on the road.

Wingo said he has long sought to make Spiffy, an on-demand car-servicing company, more sustainable. It already recycles the oil and tires it replaces on cars, but is still years away from being able to buy a fleet of electric vans for its workers, Wingo said.

Wingo had looked into carbon offsetting projects in the past, but the process was so difficult to navigate and trust that he eventually gave up.

“The beauty of Green Places is they manage that,” he said.

Wingo said using Green Places cost about as much as hiring another full-time employee, though prices vary by the size of offset a company must do. Green Places said Spiffy is on pace to offset 4,200 metric tons of carbon, equal to around 913 cars on the road.

The investment will be worth it, Wingo believes, if it reduces churn among employees and earns new business.

But perhaps more importantly for Wingo is that Green Places is helping his company tackle one of the biggest issues of the day in climate change.

Whenever he pondered whether investing in sustainability was worth it, Wingo said he would ask himself, “What do you want to pass on to your kids and grandkids?”

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate

This story was originally published October 14, 2021 at 2:33 PM.