Climate technology company Arcadia recently announced a $200 million funding round led by JPMorgan's sustainable growth equity team. Arcadia bills itself as a climate crisis-fighting technology company. The startup provides companies like Ford and Airbnb with access to renewable energy sources through its technology platform and its community solar program. Kate Henningsen, Co-Founder and COO of Arcadia, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.

Closing Bell

Arcadia Raises $200 Million Led by JPMorgan's Sustainable Growth Equity Team

climate technology company Arcadia raising 200 million. Led by Jpmorgan Sustainable Growth Equity team. Arcadia says its mission is to stop climate change by breaking the fossil fuel monopoly and that it's doing so by providing companies with access to renewable energy sources through its technology platform and its community solar program. So joining me now is the co founder and C. 00. Of Arcadia kate, Hennington kate. Thanks so much for coming on the show so much for having me. We're happy to have you tell me more about what your company does and how it's helping other companies be more eco friendly. Yeah, so, Arcadia is a software platform that is unsmiling energy data. Energy is something we all interact with on a daily basis, millions of people around the globe use it. But energy hasn't been digitized yet, it hasn't been modernized and that's because there hasn't been access to data. And so what Arcadia has done is really create a software platform that will let anyone in the world access and use energy data. And we think that's gonna be the fundamental software layer that unleashes really the transition, the decarbonization we need in our in our energy economy. And obviously you have some big backing in this effort. You've raised a lot of money. I know Jpmorgan also saying that it's committing $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years to accelerate a low carbon economy and a transition to that of course to fight climate change? What does Jpmorgan's investment mean for you, how are you going to use that to expand your services? Yeah, I mean, $200 million dollars is it's a wonderful amount of resources to have to tackle. What is a very large problem. We all know that the climate crisis is here and that's really a global effort we need. And so having these resources allows us to get more energy data to make our energy data better um and really to uh serve our customers. So we're we serve both residential and commercial customers and really expanding that to more use cases and around the world. So We're really excited for the $200 million dollars to give us more access to the energy data. Now, let's talk about some of the companies that use your services and access your data ford oracle Airbnb. Just to name a few, certainly some big name companies out there, what's the use case as to how one of these companies would use your services? Yeah. So if you think about it, everybody uses energy every day. And so there's really a spectrum of use cases that our software can support, which is what makes us such an exciting investment because there's really, so many places we can go. So just to just to give you a couple examples, um, we know right now that every client, the company really wants to be a climate company. So you're seeing companies very interested in their energy measurement, use reporting and ultimately influencing how they use energy so that they can become more sustainable. So we have companies using our platform just to measure their energy usage and then influence it to drive it down. We have E. V. Car manufacturing using our technology to make great consumer apps that tells the customer when to charge their electric vehicle, how much it's gonna cost. Maybe you should charge at a cheaper time. We have solar developers using our technology to provide four million proposals around the country to get more residential roof, solar rooftops on people's homes. And so just the broad spectrum of how people use energy. There's an arcade a use case for energy data and all of those. And so through those use cases, we're gonna make energy smarter cleaner, more responsive to the consumer. And really it's it's time, you know, it's really time for the energy sector, which is a multi trillion dollar sector uh, to have the digitization and modernization that so many other sectors have gone through with software and data and and that's what Arcadia is here to do is to provide the software layer to allow energy to modernize. Because we need to kate. Let me ask you one more question. What is the data that you're hoping to share with your investor Jpmorgan as to how you are making meaningful improvement when it comes to combating the climate crisis. Yeah, so it's very important in Arcadia that were held accountable, right? I mean, we want to be transparent, we want to show our impact. It's something we're really proud of through our technology. We've put over 700 megawatts $1.5 billion worth of new solar projects in the ground. And you know, we're driving impact on solar proposals, millions of solar proposals a year. We hope greater e. V. Adoption. And so really there's gonna be so many use cases that we measure, uh, and report on that. That should make the investor community jPMorgan really excited about how we're bringing cleaner technology, decentralized technology, decarbonization to the grid. Great Kate Hennington, co founder and Ceo O at Arcadia. Congratulations on the major funding round and thanks for joining us.