Our ability to make an impact has officially increased. Manifest Climate today announced that it has completed a seed financing of $6.5 million with an exceptional syndicate of leading technology investors. The group includes Klass Capital, Golden Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Bryker Capital, Garage Capital, Active Impact Investments, and several high net worth investors including Mark Jaine, former CEO of Intelex.
In 2015, Laura Zizzo co-founded Mantle314 to create an interdisciplinary climate strategy firm to help translate the impacts of climate for business. After 5 years, realizing that technology would be required to scale impact effectively, Laura joined forces with veteran technology entrepreneur Jeremy Greven to create Manifest Climate. While our name has changed, our vision remains unwavering: to shine the light on climate-related risks and opportunities and advance strategies for businesses to thrive.
The funding will go toward the further development, sales and marketing of Manifest, a climate risk disclosure platform that uses AI to assist businesses to enhance their understanding and disclosure of climate-related financial risks, aligned to the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD).
“This investment is a good example of capital aligning with action on climate,” said Laura Zizzo, Co-Founder and CEO, Manifest Climate. “Manifest software will unlock a company’s ability for greater transparency and demonstrate to management, boards and shareholders the value of understanding and communicating climate risks and opportunities.”
The Manifest platform is currently in pilot with more than 15 public companies from various sectors including real estate, consumer products, retail, and transportation as well as a multinational telecommunications provider and an Australian-based mining leader. This pilot is focusing on providing participants with a TCFD benchmark and maturity assessment, with a focus on recommendations to improve disclosure related to governance and risk management approaches.
A separate pilot is underway with several banks and asset managers from the USA, Europe and Canada informing teams on the fundamentals of climate and TCFD-aligned reporting, as well as tracking climate trends in various sectors, and relevant competitor activities. Future builds for the platform will include managing cross-organizational climate-related risks and opportunities, and assessing and improving climate-related processes.
“Manifest translates climate confidence into business results,” said Jeremy Greven, Co-Founder of Manifest. “Leveraging our deep climate expertise and AI, we are able to bring cutting edge tech into the world of corporate disclosure. It’s time for technology to play a bigger role in helping business understand their climate-related risks and opportunities.”
“We are committed to investing in social responsibility, environmental sustainability and compliance,” said Daniel Klass, who leads institution-backed Klass Capital with an enterprise software focus. “Manifest has a solid management team, unique domain expertise and a long-term vision to create an impact. This aligns with our preference for longer hold investments so we can support a business through scale as it grows.”
