Climate Tech Co. Rebrands, Pivots to Business Travel

Climate technology platform provider Climate Club has named an advisory board of corporate travel industry veterans and changed its name to Clarasight as it turns its focus to enterprise-wide business travel emissions data and analytics, the company announced early Wednesday.

The advisory board was formed to offer the company "advice and counsel," Clarasight CEO and co-founder Adam Braun told BTN, about product development, strategic expansion and the regulatory landscape. It includes business travel industry veterans Patrick Diemer, the co-founder and chairman of BT4Europe, tClara founder and CEO Scott Gillespie and FCM Consulting global sustainability lead Glenn Thorsen. It also includes sustainability executives Erika Murdock Balbuena, head of ESG at Robinhood, and Pagitsas Advisors founder and principal Chrissa Pagitsas.

Climate Club was launched in 2021 with the goal of assisting companies in reaching sustainability and emissions-reduction targets through enterprise-wide data collection, analysis and organizational planning.

Companies are "setting very aggressive goals, both internally and publicly, to achieve quite significant emissions-reduction targets," Braun said. "And yet this often happens in the absence of a dynamic and adaptive plan that is cascaded across the organization and aligned, most importantly, to the financial and business objectives that a company often prioritizes."

In the subsequent years, company executives concluded that business travel represented "a narrow space that we could deliver outsized value," Braun said, due to the typical size and visibility of travel budgets and its role as a significant driver of emissions, particularly among professional services and tech companies.

Clarasight—no relation to Gillespie's tClara, the similarity in names is a coincidence, Braun said—offers enterprise clients collection and reconciliation of travel and emissions data from sources including travel management companies and online booking tools, analysis of past and present emissions from travel and forecasts of travel emissions, and assistance in building a travel plan with recommendations aligning with sustainability goals.

"We will automatically generate forecasts, and we enable you to build unlimited scenario models, and we will also generate smart insights and recommendations that you can incorporate into these different scenario models so that you can identify with confidence what the best policy is that … meets each member or each function of your business where they are," Braun said.

Clarasight sells its platform with an annual subscription and often signs multiyear agreements, Braun said.