Green Places

Greenplaces (also written GreenPlaces or Green Places) is a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company that combines software with a staff of in-house specialists to produce compliance and disclosure deliverables for middle-market businesses. The company positions its offering around three pillars: sustainability (audit-ready carbon footprints, EcoVadis ratings, CDP submissions, SBTi target setting, and California SB 253/SB 261 climate disclosure), trust (SOC 2 readiness, ISO 27001, and vendor security questionnaire support), and AI governance (use-case inventory, risk assessment, policy, training, and alignment with the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF). Customer data is entered once, structured and verified by Greenplaces, and reused across successive requirements, with named expert owners responsible for each deliverable.

At launch the product was narrower: an "all-in-one sustainability platform" that integrated with tools such as Rippling, Workday, ADP, NetSuite and QuickBooks and connected to most US energy, water and natural gas utilities to build emissions visibility, then generated personalized reduction recommendations, pre-built ESG policies, Slack-based employee engagement features and embeddable public sustainability pages. According to the company, the initial offering — described as "Sustainability Compliance in a Box" — has since expanded to cover 40-plus compliance requirements across sustainability, ESG, information security and AI governance.

Greenplaces states it is a certified B Corporation that measures and offsets its own emissions and reports through EcoVadis. Its published team includes a VP of Sustainability, a Director of Sustainability, a Director of Reporting, a sustainability analyst and several senior carbon accountants, with prior experience at organizations including Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Walmart, MorganFranklin Consulting, 6sense, Etsy and FigBytes.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Alex Lassiter previously co-founded Gather, a hospitality software company acquired by Vista Equity Partners, and was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina. He encountered the problem directly while running a business selling to mid-market and enterprise customers: after GDPR took effect in 2016, RFPs arrived with stacks of compliance questions, and rather than hire a head of information security he retained consultants. Requirements multiplied from GDPR to SOC 2 to CCPA, and by 2020 supplier risk assessments also covered sustainability, ESG, health and safety, and data security and privacy, making multi-consultant management untenable. He concluded that a single technology-driven partner offering a flat rate across a company's whole compliance picture was a better model.

Business model

Greenplaces sells a managed service: dedicated senior specialists execute compliance and reporting work on behalf of the client, supported by the company's software platform and a client-facing dashboard. The company describes this as an alternative to hiring internally, engaging multiple consultants, or buying self-serve software, and positions pricing as a flat, predictable rate at a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting.

Sources describe a flat, predictable rate for a single technology-driven compliance partner rather than the unpredictable hourly rates of consultants; specific pricing is not disclosed.

Traction

By the October 2022 seed announcement the company reported over one hundred signed customers across industries, including Flatiron Health, JustWorks, SalesLoft, bartaco, Thuma and Yext. The company's about page states support for 40+ compliance requirements and cites a customer testimonial from a sustainability lead at an enterprise professional services firm regarding California SB 253/261 work.

Latest developments

The current website positions Greenplaces as managed compliance for the mid-market across three pillars — sustainability, trust (SOC 2/ISO 27001), and AI governance — a broader scope than the sustainability-only platform described at the 2022 seed round, and cites work helping customers meet California SB 253 and SB 261 requirements.