Meet the teams behind CRANE
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The CRANE tool is managed and funded by Prime Coalition, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) and catalytic investor. If you would like to make a donation to support our work, please do so here or contact us at impact@primecoalition.org.
We thank you for your commitment toward our shared climate goals.
CRANE Backstory
Many government agencies, investors, and philanthropists share a common interest in supporting early-stage companies that promise dramatic reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions. In some cases, investors aspire to use the potential climate impact of a new venture as part of their decision-making process about whether or not to invest. For many, climate impact assessment is also important after making an investment for reporting purposes. For some investors, they are merely seeking awareness.
Despite the importance of guiding investments to early-stage ventures with large potential climate impact, early-stage investors lacked a common lexicon to discuss the potential climate impacts of early-stage companies. Prior to CRANE, there has not been a standard methodology for assessing the potential climate impact of a new ventures and the technologies, solutions, or business models they bring to market.
Existing climate impact assessment tools and services were designed exclusively to retrospectively assess the climate impact of a business as it exists today. For early- stage businesses with small operations and limited to no product deployment, these tools and services did not provide actionable insights. There was a gap in the marketplace for tools to inform investors about the potential for their investments to mitigate future emissions.
In an attempt to build a better, universal climate impact assessment tool, Prime Coalition partnered with NYSERDA in 2017 to codify methodology for assessing the potential climate impact of early-stage ventures.
In 2019, NYSERDA, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Massachusetts Clean Energy Center supported Prime and three additional development partners - Greenometry, Rho Impact (formerly Rho AI) and Clean Energy Trust - to build a tool that makes the methodology available to anyone that might want to consider climate impact in their decision making: CRANE.
It is our goal to make the CRANE tool available to as many users as possible for free, whether your interest is in using impact potential as part of your pre-investment due diligence, post-investment tracking and reporting, or general awareness for your team.
Tool Timeline
We’re approaching CRANE’s ambitions with humility
Estimating impact potential is difficult, and doing it across hundreds of technologies is ambitious. We hope our users will view CRANE output reports as a helpful starting place for considering climate impact in their own diligence, reporting and conversations. Note that the CRANE tool does not precisely forecast the future, but rather provides an estimate for future impact potential.
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