A world where everything is fueled by renewable energy, all materials are reused or recycled and we finally achieve net-zero carbon emissions may sound like a distant dream. This reality, however, is only temporarily out of reach as sustainability-focused innovators are working hard toward achieving it.
These solutions have the potential to benefit humans and the planet exponentially, but developing the means for such a massive impact takes a proportionate amount of time and money. Banyan Infrastructure serves investors looking to fund a sustainable future while seeing investment returns today. The company announced a new round of capital for its sustainable project finance solution.
Serving banks, financiers and developers, Banyan aims to unlock capital for renewable infrastructure by making sustainable project financing fast, efficient and scalable, according to a company statement. The company pulled in a $25 million Series B led by Energize Ventures on Tuesday to fund its solution.
Annual spending on sustainable solutions is only expected to increase as time goes on. According to a McKinsey study, if companies are to meet net-zero goals by 2050, there’s currently a multi-trillion-dollar yearly investment gap that needs to be filled in order to deploy capital fast enough to hit these targets.
The project finance sector still operates largely on manual methodologies like emails and spreadsheets, according to Will Greene, Banyan’s CEO and co-founder. While feasible for large deal sizes like oil and gas investments, manual processes aren’t scalable for renewable infrastructure since projects in this asset class tend to be smaller, widely distributed and require time-intensive attention to detail. Without updates to the sector’s processing tools, it can take significantly more time to close and manage the same amount of capital as larger deals, Greene said.
“Banyan brings the industry into Web 3.0 and solves critical pain points by replacing manual processes with digitized loans and workflows in addition to automating data ingestion, risk monitoring and contractual compliance on each loan,” Greene told Built In via email. “The result is faster financing and greater capital deployment with more efficiency, scale and liquidity across the deal lifecycle, so we can rapidly start to close the investment gap.”
Backed by a fresh round of funding to fuel its work, Banyan will start by building out its team. The company expects to more than double its 28-person headcount over the next year with hires across product, customer success, go-to-market, engineering and sales, Greene said.
Coming off a year of 700 percent overall growth, according to a company release, Banyan will focus on transitioning to sales-led growth momentum and keeping up with demand from a soon-to-be global customer base, Greene said. Currently, the company serves names including NY Green Bank and Standard Solar.
“We’re also growing our product to build best practice new regulatory requirements, including offering a robust product offering that can support our customers in unlocking the benefits of policies like the IRA, as well as support new and emerging technologies, like carbon capture, hydrogen, batteries and more,” Greene said.
