CRANE

There is currently no common lexicon to discuss the potential future climate impacts of early-stage companies. Most climate impact tools and services have been designed primarily to assess the past climate impact of a business as it exists today. For early-stage businesses still developing their products and services, the process to assess future impact potential is non-standardized and challenging.

To fill the gap, in 2018 Prime was asked to make our in-house methodology for assessing the “Emissions Reduction Potential” or “ERP” of early-stage climate ventures available to the public. To rise to that call, we built an online, freely available software tool called CRANE, co-developed by Greenometry, Rho AI, and Evergreen Climate Innovations (formerly Clean Energy Trust), built by the team at Rho Impact and supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, NYSERDA, and Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

CRANE launched in 2020 and now has nearly 4000 registered users. It aims to make the assessment of early-stage companies’ ERP less labor-intensive and more data-driven, transparent, and standardized. CRANE aims to make it easier for a wide variety of investors, grantors, and entrepreneurs to incorporate climate impact into their own decision-making and monitoring processes.