April 23, 2023
Hi Friends and Family,
First of all, thank you again for your confidence in us! We’re deeply grateful and are doing our best to raise the pre-seed funding while securing our first 10 customers.
As a refresher, Cadence OneFive is building a market network (Momentum) to speed up decarbonization of multifamily buildings by solving the information asymmetries and trust gaps between lenders, owners, and contractors. Our market nationally is the $6.5 billion currently spent on energy and construction consulting (~10% of the $65 billion spent annually by multifamily on rehabs).
I spent Earth Day out in the Bay Area honing the sales, go-to-market, and financials sections of our investor pitch at a workshop by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. We were among the 15 startups “down selected” to do this part 2 session, from 50 picked to participate in part 1. My trip coincided with San Francisco Earth Week, so I was able to do some networking also, which resulted in an invitation to pitch from a SF investor and for an intro meeting with a large west coast multifamily owner.
I’ll plan to send you these updates once a quarter. Once we have our first VC investor, there will also be a monthly investor update. If you want to receive the more frequent updates, please let me know!
With much love and enthusiasm from sunny Berkeley,
- Bomee
Vitals
Highlights
We’re a hit with green banks: We landed three of the top 5 Northeast green lenders in Q1: New York Green Bank, Inclusive Prosperity Capital, and Community Preservation Corporation(CPC).
Expanding to all of NY State: CPC will be using Momentum as the backbone of New York State’s $250 million electrification program for low-income multifamily buildings.
Accelerators: We completed the MassChallenge/Kaplak Decarbonization Accelerator where we received mentorship on using the Dreams and Details framework to strengthen the connection between our mission and our GTM strategy. We’re currently participating in the Newlab cohort of the NYC Founder Fellowship and the City Fellowship by Company Ventures. We were also down-selected to pitch at the Greentown Labs pitch day in May for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s IMPEL accelerator.
Challenges
Fundraising isn’t done until it’s done. We’re in deep due diligence with several strategic and institutional investors and I’m confident that we will have our first VC term sheet shortly! That said, I’m told we can’t take anything for granted and need to keep pushing on until all the money is in the bank! Please ping Bomee if you have anyone we should pitch!
Need more hands on deck for product. We’re really fast at development – we delivered v1 of Momentum for ConEd in just 2 months last year – but our plans are very ambitious and we’re figuring out how to have more work going on in parallel. Closing our pre-seed will certainly help with resources, but in the meantime, we’ve brought on Jeremy Parker, an experienced front-end developer, on a part-time consulting basis, and added a fantastic graduate CS intern, Minghan Zhu.
How you can help us!
First, we’re still pitching angel investors. If there’s anyone in your network who would be excited by our work, please let me know!
Secondly, looking ahead to the day when we have all the pre-seed investment in hand, we’re starting to look around for folks who will be great additions to our team. If you have folks who you think will be super jazzed by our mission and company, please connect us!
In the short-term, we’ll be looking for:
Guy or gal Friday. Who’s that kid who’s going places? The one who just loves to learn and figure things out on their own because waiting around for someone to tell them exactly how to do it is just too boring? We want that person. Maybe they’ll run this joint some day.
Very friendly and patient junior to mid-level energy consultant or mechanical engineer with a bit of building science background. This person will work closely with our early customers to a) make sure we’re solving their most painful retrofit process problems and b) feeding on-the-ground intel back to our product team
Mid-level product manager with boundless energy and start-up experience. We feel strongly that we’re on the right track to keep product ownership in the hands of domain experts, but we’re also aware that we don’t know the ins-and-outs of professional product management. The perfect person for this role would be someone who loves wrangling the chaos of the “working prototype to first customer version” journey, and who has an eye for clean UI-UX.
Multifamily Decarbonization In the News
Ramping up construction to address both housing quality and carbon performance is a key climate justice issue. We believe the IRA funding for multifamily could catalyze carbon-responsive construction well beyond this decade. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has just announced the program design for the $27B Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF):
$20B will be granted to national and regional non-profit intermediaries that leverage public funding to attract private funding and advance green energy or efficiency projects. $6B of this total is earmarked for activities in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
GGRF is one reason why our customers are asking us to move faster! As mentioned in our highlights, we have closed with three of the top five green banks in the Northeast and we continue to gain traction with funders of multifamily retrofits. We applaud the advancements in funding, which, combined with IRA tax credits, may be the largest infusion of capital into multifamily housing in a generation.
For more info:
How to Make the Most of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (Quantified Ventures)