CRANE

Before 2018, there was no common lexicon to discuss the potential future climate impacts of early-stage companies. Most climate impact tools and services were designed primarily to assess footprinting, or the past climate impact of a business as it exists today. For early-stage businesses still developing their products and services, assessing or forecasting future impact potential was an ambiguous and challenging process.

Prime was asked to help address this significant gap by making our in-house methodology for assessing the 'Emissions Reduction Potential' (ERP) of early-stage climate ventures available to the public. To rise to that call, we built an online, freely available software tool called CRANE (Carbon Reduction Assessment for New Enterprises), co-developed by Greenometry, Rho AI, and Evergreen Climate Innovations (formerly Clean Energy Trust), built by the team at Rho Impact and supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, NYSERDA, and Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

CRANE is designed as a standardized, easy-to-use tool for philanthropists, impact investors, and others to calculate forward-looking impacts of emerging climate technologies. Its latest iteration was released in April 2024 during San Francisco Climate Week (SFCW), aligning with pre-investment methodology guidance developed by Project Frame. With over 5,000 registered users, the tool reduces the barrier to entry for those wishing to conduct forward-looking emissions assessments, making the impact assessment of early-stage companies less labor-intensive, more data-driven, transparent, and standardized, thereby enabling more capital to flow toward solutions with the highest potential for impact.