Green Infrastructure Data Platform Paces raises $1.9M Pre-Seed led by Resolute Ventures

We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $1.9m in Pre-Seed funding, which will help us on our mission to decarbonize the built environment by enabling more green infrastructure to be profitably built, faster and in the right places.  The investment was led by Resolute Ventures with Y Combinator, UpHonest Capital, Climate Capital, KD Venture Partners and The Sky Foundation also contributing to the round.

"We are delighted to back Paces as they work to build the data and software layer for green infrastructure,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, Partner & Co-Founder at Resolute Ventures. “We have strong conviction that this is the right team to take on this ambitious effort.  Combined with their unique approach to data analytics, Paces will enable developers and investors to build trillions in green infrastructure".

We must build trillions worth of green infrastructure like solar, wind, EVs and hydrogen to have any chance of a sub 1.5 degree world. The problem is that it is really hard to build these projects and getting harder. Nimbyism, zoning and grid capacity issues mean that only 1 in 5 green infrastructure projects that are attempted end up being built, costing $18 Billion in canceled US projects per year. As discussed recently by Energy Impact Partners: “geography, landscape and the rights to land—will be a common constraint among climatetech solutions as we reach gigaton-scale reductions of emissions.”

Founded in early 2022, by James McWalter and Charles Bai, Paces enables more green infrastructure to be built profitably, accelerating a climate positive built environment. We do this by collecting zoning, permitting, grid and environmental data and helping green infrastructure project developers and investors understand what projects make sense for a particular parcel.

With a background at Fortune500 companies like Facebook AI and FactSet, Paces’ founding team have scaled software and data solutions across multiple industries. Paces CTO and co-founder Charles Bai believes that green infrastructure development is ripe for disruption, “There are software and data techniques and technologies that are well established in other industries like social media and finance, but they are mostly unheard of in large scale green development. It is really exciting to bring these techniques to bear on developments like solar and hydrogen.”

Paces CEO and co-founder James McWalter says the raise will have two primary objectives:

“First we need to create a world class data set. We are doing a ton of data collection across the US from zoning to interconnection. Green infrastructure developers often need to jump across many different sources and spend a ton of time making phone calls to find the due diligence data they need to make a decision. By combining these datasets we can add immediate value. Second we are building out various technical tools to display this data in a way that helps developers make decisions faster.”