July 18, 2023
Hello friends,
We hope you’re having a great summer and are as energized as we are by the growing momentum for climate action!
As a refresher, Cadence OneFive is building a vertical SaaS marketplace (Momentum) to speed up decarbonization of existing multifamily buildings.
In Q2, we were buoyed up by everyone’s excitement as IRA deployment (like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) takes shape and running flat out to build features that take our users deeper into the retrofit process. As much as we’re motivated by the emerging opportunities, we’re also reminded of the acute need to upgrade multifamily buildings for the effects of climate change already upon us.
New ARR since last update: $140
New ARR since Jan 1: $243K
Q2 Monthly gross burn: $122K
Product: We’re working diligently to support the full retrofit construction workflow in Momentum, extending our initial feature set generating construction scopes of work. We’ll be rolling out new contractor procurement features in just a couple of weeks!
Fractional CTO: We’ve brought on Reuben Firmin to help us prepare to scale the engineering team. We’re thrilled to benefit from both his hands-on technical expertise and his extensive experience growing startup tech teams from founding to exit.
Customers: We’re onboarding lenders this month for New York State’s Climate Friendly Homes Fund. As noted in the last update, Momentum is the backbone of this $250 million electrification program administered by the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), the nation’s largest multifamily-focused CDFI lender. CPC recently partnered with Calvert Impact and SelfHelp to compete to deploy a portion of the $27B Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
How can we support IRA capital deployment nationally? We’ve been spending a lot of quality time with lenders, community organizations, and service providers who plan to play a role in the deployment of the IRA subsidies! With capital deployment planned for late 2024, we want to make sure we’re on track to support lenders and hubs nationally. So far, we’ve heard strong confirmation that there is a great need for digitizing the scoping, bidding and tracking of multifamily renovation projects.
How can public health and micro-environmental data drive building upgrades that improve resident health outcomes? Julie Caracino (New School) and Stephanie Wall (Yale), two graduate summer interns with environmental and public health expertise, are helping us to identify and prepare the research base to algorithmically recommend building upgrades that close the health equity gap in low-income and racialized communities.
Balancing Building Science & Software Capacity: Our product team is an unusual mix of building scientists and software developers. It’s always been a challenge to keep them in balance so as to avoid bottlenecks. For a while, our Mech-Es were generating more work than could be coded by our developers, and now, we’re in the reverse position!
Tooling & Process: We realized we need to improve production processes so that we can scale more easily. Over the past few weeks, we conducted a thorough review and look forward to doubling down on remote-first best practices.
Engineering leadership: This fall, we’ll start the process of finding the right leader in engineering management to shape our technology vision, strategy, and execution for the long haul. It’s a role requiring technical knowledge, dexterous management, and aligned values. We’d really appreciate it if you would introduce us to your really special people.
The Biden-Harris Administration announces a $20B competition to catalyze investment in clean energy projects and tackle the climate crisis. The competition will expand investment in new projects that reduce pollution across the country and is a part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
Our customer NY Green Bank launched its $250M Community Decarbonization Fund, which will provide low-cost capital to community Development Financial Institutions and other mission-driven lenders financing GHG-reducing initiatives in disadvantaged communities through 2025.
Indoor air quality, public health, and the need for healthier buildings were in the news as smoke from Canadian wildfires decreased air quality across parts of the United States this past June. For many residents, the crisis highlights how much worse indoor air quality can be than outdoor air quality and further pushed cities such as New York to address the issue. Around the same time, The Lancet, CDC and ASHRAE* also set new health-based targets for public and commercial buildings.