MORGANTOWN, W.Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Iconic Air, a SaaS platform that helps energy-intensive industries automate, benchmark, and manage the cost of carbon and their carbon footprint, today announced the launch of its Emissions Intelligence™ platform. The platform offers a suite of tools for managing carbon, similar to financial performance, saving organizations significant time and money. The launch comes as Iconic Air secured $5 million in seed funding. The round was led by XYZ Venture Capital, with participation from Garuda Ventures, the GTM fund, and investors from Country Roads Angel Network. Funds will be used for hiring top software engineering and carbon talent as well as growing its sales team as Iconic Air continues building out platform capabilities.
The Iconic Air Emissions Intelligence platform is introduced as all industries undergo the energy transition, where carbon emissions are measured and tracked with the same importance as dollars and cents. The oil and gas industry in particular has felt the pressure from regulators and capital allocators to document efforts to decarbonize, and today they are working hard to implement transparent and standard reporting. In addition, operators looking to raise debt and/or equity capital at competitive rates are being asked to demonstrate a history of tracking ESG KPIs at an increasing granularity and frequency, as opposed to simply providing an annual report.
With the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) an urgent need has sparked for even more organizations to track – and manage – their carbon emissions. There are numerous incentives and fees in the IRA aimed at reducing methane emissions, e.g., the EPA has $1.5 billion at its disposal to support emissions monitoring and methane reduction efforts through grants, rebates, contracts, loans, and other forms of financial support. On the flip side, facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2 annually will be fined for each ton of methane emitted above a specific annual amount, which can hit the bottom line of large energy focused companies hard. Organizations that integrate monitoring and reporting at the facility level into their workflows will save substantially by reporting deftly and accurately, and those that want to reduce their potential fee burdens will need granular insights to effectively target and reduce problem areas. This is precisely where Iconic Air comes into play.
“Manually tracking carbon emissions on a spreadsheet is no longer best practice, nor is it scalable, and outsourcing carbon reporting can become an increasingly costly expenditure,” said Kyle Gillis, Co-founder and CEO of Iconic Air. “We are giving energy-intensive industries access to modern, intelligent tools that not only help them comply with new regulations and gain better access to funding, but also provide the types of insights that allow companies to plan for the future and successfully lower their carbon footprint – all while making the tracking process infinitely more efficient.”
The Iconic Air Emissions Intelligence Platform
After completing a very successful beta with several large, publicly traded customers, the Emissions Intelligence product launches with core functionality that helps companies:
- Automate: Emissions Intelligence is designed to process and calculate carbon data more granularly and more frequently, providing customers with targeted operational insights. Organizations leveraging Iconic Air are advancing to compute and report emissions data monthly (versus annually with manual, unscalable processes) using Iconic Air’s data management and visualization tools.
- Benchmark: Iconic Air recognizes that data isn’t valuable unless it can be interrogated, comparable and standardized. Emissions Intelligence ingests thousands of companies’ carbon data every year for operators to do peer analyses and operational assessments, along with providing analytical and visualization tools to internally assess carbon performance across assets. With Emissions Intelligence, organizations can narrow in on outliers and underperforming assets.
- Manage: Using the platform to identify movements in emissions data with greater frequency and at a more detailed level enables organizations to make informed decisions and take rapid action, rather than creeping along over a multi-year period. As the price of carbon continues to escalate, using the Emissions Intelligence feature to forecast carbon emissions and calculate impact of emission reduction projects provides organizations with the information to improve how they manage the cost of carbon over the course of the next decade.
Using its ability to integrate with a federated structure of commercially-available applications and proprietary data sources, Emissions Intelligence is Iconic Air’s customers’ System of Intelligence for ESG, providing energy-intensive companies with a platform that can engage within financial, HR, and operational data ecosystems. The launch of Iconic Air’s Emissions Intelligence platform comes at a time when all companies, large and small, will have to evaluate how to reduce their carbon emissions and communicate a credible journey to Net Zero. The increasing regulatory, investor, and public pressures mean they must continue to innovate.
Uniting Vertical Knowledge With Best-in-Class Technology
Iconic Air has recently struck a partnership with Diversified Energy, an independent energy company engaged in the production, marketing and transportation of primarily natural gas related to its U.S. onshore upstream and midstream assets.
“We have found a trusted partner that shares the view that our Smarter Asset Management program is the future of carbon in the oil & gas industry,” said Paul Espenan, Senior Vice President-EHS at Diversified Energy. “Iconic Air's SaaS platform simplifies and automates carbon disclosure processes, giving our practitioners the ability to make cost-efficient improvements to Diversified's operations and emissions profile.”
Based in Morgantown, West Virginia – in the heart of the Marcellus Shale Basin – West Virginia University classmates Kyle Gillis and James Carnes founded Iconic Air in 2020 to help the oil and gas industry decarbonize faster and smarter, working in partnership to revolutionize an industry critical to the world’s energy transition. Hailing from a place where energy is critical to the economy, they understand the trilemma of providing sustainable, affordable, and reliable energy to society. Iconic Air brings decades of operational and carbon experience to assist their customers on their journey to net-zero and delivering the cleanest molecule in the world.
"The new financial metric for energy-intensive industries is carbon -- Kyle and James saw this opportunity clearly,” said Chauncey Hamilton, Partner at XYZ. “They understand these complex issues firsthand, and they've assembled the right team to go after this massive opportunity. The customer pull has already been immense. Iconic Air will move all energy-intensive industries into the future with elegant software that's easy to use and profoundly impactful."
To learn more about Iconic Air, please visit www.iconicair.io or follow us on our blog, www.iconicair.io/blog
About Iconic Air
Iconic Air is helping energy-intensive industries decarbonize faster with industry-leading sustainability tools. Emissions Intelligence™ enables operators to calculate, visualize, and report emissions data more frequently. Its software brings data to life to assist with auditing, forecasting, and scenario planning. Learn more at www.iconicair.io.
