Meet the teams behind CRANE

Prime Coalition Logo
Prime Coalition
Management & Funding

Prime Coalition plays a key role in codifying methodology for assessing the potential climate impact of early-stage ventures. This is part of Prime's effort to improve forward-looking climate impact assessment across the early-stage investment field.

Rho Impact Logo
Rho Impact
Development & Methodology

Rho Impact leads the development and contributes to the core methodology behind the CRANE tool. Rho works directly with investors and climate tech startups to help advance the state-of-the-art in credible impact forecasting.

Join our philanthropic partners and support CRANE

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

January 2019
Team CRANE met in Boston to kickstart the back-end design process and scope critical specifications for users. CRANE’s Academic Advisory Group and Super User Group were both convened for the first time.
July 2019
CRANE convened two large events at the ARPA-E Summit in Denver, CO, to better inform what was “in scope” and “out of scope” for v1 of the tool. One event focused on the credibility and rigor of back-end methodology and one event focused on the needs of potential users.
November 2019
CRANE deployed as a beta version and began testing for feedback with 300+ beta users. Improvements were made in real time as feedback flowed in over four months of live testing.
April 2020
CRANE publicly launched v1 with plans for future versions that support the public good along with enterprise features for users that need custom solutions.
November 2020
CRANE —facilitated by Rho Impact, is used to evaluate the potential impact of over 35 MaRS Discovery District competition applicants.
May 2021
CRANE Custom tech module is released. Rho Impact builds the new CRANE module based on user feedback, to enable users to generate customized technology solutions for CRANE evaluations.
July 2021
CRANE User Report published in collaboration with Prime and Rho Impact. Feedback from CRANE users to publish a report identifying pain points in the impact due diligence process.
April 2024
Global launch of general availability of the CRANE tool based on years of real world use and feedback.

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.

Join our Slack Community

Unlock the full potential of CRANE by joining its growing community, where you can get expert advice, access important resources, and connect with like-minded individuals.