Green Places

GreenPlaces (Green Places, Inc.) is a Raleigh, North Carolina sustainability software company founded in 2021 by Alex Lassiter. Its platform measures a business's carbon footprint, recommends emissions reductions and helps companies communicate their sustainability progress. At launch the product calculated a company's carbon footprint in under 60 seconds and purchased carbon-removal projects — such as wind and solar farms and tree planting — on the customer's behalf to offset emissions, while suggesting operational changes such as replacing fluorescent lighting. Customers received a "Green Place to Work" badge and a hosted sustainability page they could embed on their own website.

The product later broadened into an all-in-one carbon accounting and ESG platform. It integrates customers' operational data with sustainability benchmarks by connecting to existing business tools including HR, payroll and accounting systems (Rippling, Workday, ADP, NetSuite, QuickBooks) and to nearly all US electricity, water and natural gas utilities, reducing manual data entry. The collected data is analyzed alongside industry expertise to generate personalized reduction recommendations tied to cost savings. Additional features include ESG policy templates and a policy library, compliance and reporting tools, a branded public sustainability website, and employee engagement through integrations such as Slack for posting progress updates and climate competitions.

The company positions its offering around businesses outside the Fortune 500, citing an estimate that over 83% of global emissions — roughly 39 billion tonnes of CO2e — fall outside the largest corporations.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Alex Lassiter, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded the Atlanta hospitality software company Gather (acquired in 2017), started Green Places in Raleigh to address the gap he saw for small businesses that wanted a climate initiative but lacked the time, resources or expertise to build one. He framed the market opportunity around employee and job-seeker expectations, noting that a substantial share of millennials had left jobs over the absence of an employer sustainability plan. His track record helped him assemble an angel round of Triangle- and Atlanta-area founders whose own companies became early customers; lead investor Jesse Lipson, founder of ShareFile and CEO of Levitate, was Lassiter's neighbor, made his first outside investment in the company, and signed Levitate on as an early customer.

Business model

GreenPlaces operates a subscription software business, selling a recurring sustainability platform subscription to businesses. Early on it also purchased carbon-removal and offset projects on behalf of customers.

Subscription-based; the company described employing a subscription model with the intent that each customer signs on as a recurring commitment.

Traction

Green Places reported offsetting nearly 25,000 tons of carbon and making more than 30 companies carbon-neutral within roughly two weeks of its June 2021 launch. By October 2022 it reported over one hundred signed customers, including Flatiron Health, JustWorks, SalesLoft, bartaco, Thuma and Yext. By the June 2023 Series A, named customers included bartaco, Graduate Hotels, Zuora, Salesloft and Network Wireless Solutions.

Latest developments

The most recent development in the sources is the June 2023 $13 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, intended to extend the platform to the mass market of businesses outside the Fortune 500.