Clear Standards Scores $4M for Emissions Management Software

Clear Standards, a developer of enterprise software for tracking greenhouse-gas emissions, water and energy use, and energy efficiency, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from the venture capital firms Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Kinetic Ventures. Novak Biddle also provided seed funding for the Sterling, Va.-based company last year.

With new carbon regulations on the post-inauguration horizon, pressure for companies to get ahead on their environmental impacts has increased. That’s why public carbon markets saw their worth triple in 2006 and are forecast by the World Bank to do so again by 2015. It’s also a big part of why Clear Standards faces a highly competitive field. At stake for companies like Clear Standards, eps Corp. and Planet Metrics is the business of the world’s largest companies, many of whose investors now demand climate change risk assessments and at least 3,000 of which have signed on with the nonprofit Carbon Disclosure Project.

Like Planet Metrics, a climate-modeling software developer that secured Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson earlier this month, Clear Standards operates on a subscription model, with customers paying an annual or quarterly fee for its web-based tools and services.