AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.
The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.
The problem AMEE is addressing is that there are currently, multiple standards and hundreds of thousands of individual emission factors used to determine something’s carbon footprint.
So AMEE has codified the major greenhouse gas standards, their computation models, and emission factors into an engine that is available to clients via its API. This is exposed as a RESTful HTTP-based web service with XML, JSON and Atom interfaces. Customers so far include SAS and the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). AMEE’s search engine also enables discovery of greenhouse gas standards and emission factors.
In July last year it boosted its board with Toby Coppel, former chief strategy officer of Yahoo!
It has also created RealTimecCarbon, a joint project by Dynamic Demand, AMEE and Demand Logic, which lets you see the real-time carbon intensity of electricity so consumers can avoid consuming at times of high emissions. This could eventualy be linked to appliances, buildings and factories so they could automatically manage demand according to the carbon being released.
Pat Burtis, Investment Manager at Amadeus Capital Partners, joins the AMEE Board of Directors.