PERSEFONI

Kentaro Kawamori had spent years in energy and climate consulting before co-founding Persefoni in 2020 with Johnny White. The name comes from Greek mythology — Persephone, goddess of the harvest and renewal.

The founding insight was specific and uncomfortable: financial institutions face the most complex carbon accounting problem in the economy. A bank's direct operations — offices, servers, travel — represent a tiny fraction of its true carbon impact.

The real number is financed emissions: the sum of the carbon footprints of every company and project the bank has lent money to or invested in. That's called Scope 3, Category 15, and calculating it correctly requires a different methodology than anything else in climate accounting.

Kentaro and Johnny built Persefoni to solve exactly that problem. They embedded the PCAF (Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials) methodology — the international standard for measuring financed emissions — directly into their platform.

Banks and asset managers could finally generate credible, auditable numbers for their lending and investment portfolios.

Prelude Ventures led their $9.7 million Series A in November 2021. Six months later, TPG Rise Climate led a $101 million Series B.

The institutional climate investing arm of one of the world's largest PE firms backing them validated the market opportunity.

Persefoni sells SaaS subscriptions to financial institutions — banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and pension funds. The platform automates the measurement of financed emissions across loan and investment portfolios using the PCAF methodology.

It then generates the reports those institutions need to comply with TCFD, IFRS S2, the SEC's climate disclosure rules, and central bank stress testing requirements on climate risk.

The financial services focus is a deliberate narrowing of scope. Rather than building a generic carbon accounting tool, Persefoni went deep on the specific data structures, methodologies, and reporting formats that banks and asset managers need.

That depth is the moat.

The core financed emissions platform calculates a financial institution's Scope 3 Category 15 emissions across its loan and investment book — applying PCAF methodology to each asset class (corporate lending, real estate, mortgages, equity holdings). It integrates with financial data sources to automate data collection rather than requiring manual entry.

The TCFD reporting module generates the standardized climate risk disclosures that financial institutions are required (or expected) to publish annually. The platform outputs reports in the formats required by regulators across multiple jurisdictions.

The IFRS S2 compliance module is Persefoni's newest build — aligned with the International Sustainability Standards Board's climate disclosure standard, which is being adopted by regulators across 20+ countries.

Persefoni's growth strategy was vertical focus. By building exclusively for financial institutions rather than all enterprises, they could go deeper faster.

Banks don't want a general-purpose carbon calculator — they want a platform that understands PCAF methodology, integrates with Bloomberg and other financial data feeds, and generates reports their auditors and regulators will accept.

The KPMG global partnership was a major accelerant. KPMG's climate practice needed a platform to deliver carbon audits to their financial institution clients.

Persefoni became that platform, giving them access to KPMG's global enterprise client base as a distribution channel.

The regulatory timeline also drove urgency. Central banks in Europe, the UK, and increasingly the US began requiring financial institutions to stress-test for climate risk.

TCFD reporting went from voluntary to effectively mandatory for large institutions. Every new disclosure requirement created a fresh wave of institutions who needed a solution immediately.

The regulatory timeline is the main risk. If central banks and securities regulators slow down or weaken climate disclosure requirements — which has happened under political pressure in multiple jurisdictions — the urgency driving purchasing decisions at financial institutions weakens with it.

Banks are good at waiting for a deadline to actually be real before spending money.

The competitive landscape is also intensifying. Watershed has made moves toward the financial sector.

Large consulting firms (KPMG itself, Deloitte, PwC) are building their own tools. Bloomberg and MSCI are adding climate data products that overlap with Persefoni's use cases.

Being a vertical specialist means deep product but also a narrower customer base to grow into.

Prelude Ventures led the $9.7 million Series A in November 2021 — they're a San Francisco-based climate specialist fund. TPG Rise Climate led the $101 million Series B in June 2022 — the climate investing arm of TPG, one of the largest PE firms in the world.

Energy Impact Partners also participated. The TPG Rise Climate backing is significant: it connects Persefoni to TPG's portfolio companies and to the firm's network of institutional investors who are themselves facing emissions reporting requirements.