Adam Braun’s first two entrepreneurial ventures had to do with education.
First, he launched Pencils of Promise in 2008, a nonprofit organization that has started more than 500 schools in Ghana, Guatemala, Laos and Nicaragua. In 2017, he launched the education startup MissionU, which WeWork acquired the following year.
Braun’s next venture, Climate Club, is focused on helping large companies engage their employees in reaching their climate goals. The company, which is emerging from stealth on Wednesday, is opening with Facebook parent company Meta and management consulting company Bain among its first pilot customers.
Around a year ago, Braun and his college roommate at Brown, Philip Charm, got together with their 4-year-old children.
“As we were watching our young children play, and really just exploring the world around them, our conversation was drifting into what their future is going to look like, and the life that we want for them ahead,” Braun told CNBC.
That conversation included realizing that by the time their children are as old as Braun and Charm are now, it would be just past 2050.
“Their futures will really be determined by the decisions we make starting now,” he said. “That became this really profound call to action for us, as parents to young children, but also, I would say, as caring citizens, that we had to do something about this.”
At the same time, Braun and Charm were watching large companies across the board make bold decarbonization commitments that employees were mostly ignoring or not involved with. Solving that disconnect is the task of Climate Club.
“The simplest distillation of it is that we embed sustainability into the employee experience. And we do so both with alignment towards net zero, as well as true business goals,” Braun told CNBC.
As part of the company’s launch, Climate Club is also announcing it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by XYZ Venture Capital and Vestigo Ventures.
“We believe that Climate Club will be one of the most important tools in the Chief Sustainability Officer’s tech stack,” Chauncey Hamilton, a partner at XYZ, told CNBC. “Corporations have set ambitious goals for hitting Net Zero and keep pushing the timeline up earlier and earlier to meet their goals with lots of companies targeting 2030 or sooner. With increased pressure and regulations ahead, we see it as imperative to create a culture of reducing carbon emissions throughout an enterprise.”
Vestigo Ventures was interested in Climate Club to increase employee satisfaction, helping with recruiting and retention.
“The data is clear that employees want to be at companies that make the world better — and expect more from their employers,” Mark Casady, the founder and general partner at Vestigo Ventures, told CNBC.
Indeed, almost seven in 10 workers care about a company’s environmental track record when considering whether to take a job, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March of 2021. Twenty-four percent of survey respondents said a company’s environmental track record is a major factor in their decision, and 45 percent said it would be a minor factor.
“Climate Club is hitting the market at exactly the right time to enable employers and employees to work together on these goals,” Casady told CNBC. “Climate Club’s combination of software and engagement initiatives solves the challenge of collecting accurate Scope 3 emissions data while enabling reduced costs, measurable carbon reduction, and new pathways to growth.”