Anika Begay
The irony was not lost on her. Raised as the daughter of a racing-obsessed family, Danielle Walsh had become — in her late 20s — the director of HSBC’s “Future Cities” project, the global banking giant’s effort to meet client mandates on climate change.
It was 2018, and she was in charge of both the bank’s technology mergers and acquisitions and its Chief Data Officer.
“After a year and a half of sitting on a plane and talking to customers, I realized that the world would have to spend trillions a year just to meet the net zero climate goals that were set for road transportation alone,” Walsh recalled. He saw this as an opportunity and launched his startup to address the problem in 2021.
Fast forward to today, and as the founder and CEO of her startup Clearly, Walsh (pictured above, center, with her two investors) has closed a $4.3 million Seed round to bolster her flagship product: an AI-powered “climate intelligence” platform for transportation fleet operators. The platform, Walsh says, is granular enough to know when to alert a driver to inflate a vehicle’s tires for optimal climate-friendly performance.
The funding round was led by Pace Ventures and Nine Realms and also saw participation from mobility investors Mobilion, Next Gear, and M1720, along with investors Lord Nash and Margaux Primat.
The problem Clearly is tackling may seem obvious, but the devil is in the details. While we are all aware of the trucks and delivery cars on our roads, and sometimes how much exhaust they emit, decarbonizing both the transportation fleet and the underlying supply chains is a vast and expensive puzzle.
The transportation sector is responsible for 25% of global emissions, making it one of the most important keys to unlocking a reduction in CO2 in the atmosphere. It is estimated that it will cost $1.75 trillion to decarbonize the sector, which means changing vehicles, upgrading energy networks and more. Meanwhile, transportation emissions are expected to increase 60% by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.
Founded in 2021, Clearly is trying to solve part of that puzzle. Its platform, based on anonymized data from its customers, who are logistics operators, fleet owners, and other participants in the transportation supply chain, includes diagnostics on vehicle movement and performance, GPS, tracking, IoT data, cargo weight, and more. Based on that, the resulting dashboard then provides a variety of emissions-related insights for fleet managers, as well as alerts, delivered via an app, for drivers, intended to “nudge” their behavior. (These could include instructions like “Try driving slower.”) The platform now tracks more than 100 million customer trips.
The aim is to help operators save money while ensuring compliance with regulations and emissions targets, which are now enshrined in law in many countries.
The company’s current top-tier customers include Webfleet, Bridgestone’s fleet management solution.
Walsh says Clearly’s data has shown that up to 30% of fuel consumption is influenced by driving behaviour alone, hence the importance of showing drivers data on how to improve their performance.
“This space is expanding rapidly, and we’ve been impressed by the significant demand from large enterprises and the financial sector for Clearly’s product,” said Marius Swart, a partner at Pace Ventures, in a statement. “We see the need for data-driven procurement and AI-driven operational decision making expanding at a rapid pace.”
That said, Clearly is up against large incumbents. These tend to be large telematics providers, which is a challenge, according to Walsh: They may have data, but they have struggled to build platforms that fleet operators can practically apply.
“They track vehicles, tire pressure, driver behavior, but they don’t know how to add this additional data,” he told TechCrunch. While he admits that any company looking for operational efficiency or fleet management “could expand their product into our space,” he says they would need a new technology stack that goes beyond that.
“If I take 1% of the market, I can make a billion in revenue,” he said. “I would welcome other players. It’s a very big market.”
So what would you say to your racing-mad family now that you’ve gone from car lovers to climate lovers?
“Well, I just raised $4 million… What do you think?” Walsh jokes.
