It is with great pleasure that we announce a new partnership with Energy Impact Partners! Founded on a commitment to advance the transition to a net-zero carbon future, Energy Impact Partners invests in global companies focused on sustainable energy and net-zero emissions.
Through its Elevate Future Fund, Energy Impact Partners (EIP) was a participating investor during Rheaply’s $20 million inter-series funding round this year. The Elevate Future Fund makes direct venture investments in promising, early-stage companies that address the socioeconomic disparities of communities facing environmental crises.
This funding round makes Rheaply co-founder and CEO, Dr. Garry Cooper Jr., the single highest-funded Black entrepreneur in climate tech in the city of Chicago. With this funding, we intend to focus on driving a revolutionary shift in enterprise resource management. We will further scale our tech development efforts, develop our consulting services to help more organizations strategically progress toward their sustainability goals, and grow our partnership program to bring more industry, technology, and community partners into the circular economy.
“Since founding Rheaply, we have been working to demonstrate the economic and environmental impact of circularity through our collaborations with government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies,” said Dr. Cooper. “This investment from Energy Impact Partners and other climate-conscious organizations is further evidence of the power of circularity, and we are energized to have their support as we scale.”
What’s next for Rheaply?
It’s long been our belief that the traditional take-make-waste linear economic model of production and consumption hinders our chance to reduce the effects of global warming. We’re harnessing the largest untapped opportunity to reduce carbon emissions through operationalizing the circular economy by reusing workplace resources often prone to waste—furniture, fixtures and equipment.
We want every organization to think more about the carbon emitted during the manufacturing process, as well as the carbon associated with everything from office chairs and desks to the building materials associated with structures. Scaling the visibility and transferability of these items, and allowing organizations to measure the value, can provide the triple bottom line win with reductions in purchase price, waste, and embodied carbon emissions.
As the company has grown, we have sharpened our focus on embodied carbon in the built environment, a sector that produces a huge share (37%) of total carbon emissions globally. Our continuous improvement of the Rheaply platform has enabled organizations across a wide range of verticals to better understand how the reuse of resources translates to avoided carbon emissions. New features like the estimated embodied carbon avoidance report equip organizations with insights to take action more effectively against climate change.
“We are excited to join Rheaply’s latest round as the company continues innovating in the circular economy space,” said Anthony Oni, Managing Partner of the Elevate Future Fund. “The Elevate Future fund exists to create more opportunities for diverse founders and entrepreneurs such as Garry, and to create essential ESG solutions to accelerate our net zero future.”
