CHICAGO-- Rheaply, a resource exchange platform helping industry-leading organizations better visualize, quantify, and utilize their purchased goods, materials, and resources, today announced that it has raised $20MM in an inter-series round anchored by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Additional investments came from the John Doerr Family Trust; Coupa Ventures; PSP Growth; Rankin Family Ventures; and executives, including Joe Thomas (CEO & co-founder of Loom). Existing investors, including High Alpha, Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund, Emerson Collective, Techstars, and HPA, also returned to participate.
Since its founding in 2016, Rheaply has continuously driven forward the conversation around the power of reusing workplace resources. Rheaply’s innovative technology has significantly increased adoption of — and thus access to the benefits of — the circular economy for Fortune 500 companies, governments, and other large organizations. The company services private enterprises such as Google, Exelon, and AbbVie, establishing Rheaply as a household name not only in climate tech, but in the broader business world.
As the company has grown, it has sharpened its focus on embodied carbon in the built environment, a sector that produces a huge share (37%) of total carbon emissions globally. Because of Rheaply’s work, including its recent launch of a new estimated embodied carbon avoidance feature on the platform, organizations across a wide range of verticals can now understand how the reuse of resources translates to avoided carbon emissions. These new insights equip organizations to take action more effectively against climate change.
With this funding, Rheaply intends to further scale its tech development efforts, develop its consulting services to help more organizations strategically progress toward their sustainability goals, and grow its partnership program to bring more industry, technology, and community partners into the circular economy. The company will focus on developing a new solution that Rheaply refers to as “recirculated enterprise resource planning” (“re-ERP”). Rheaply’s solution will address the limitations of existing ERP systems by enabling organizations to track and exchange resources with utility from purchasing stages (upstream) to disposition decisions (downstream). Clients will gain enhanced capabilities for evaluating and managing the total environmental impact of their business resource management operations.
The funding round is also significant as it makes Rheaply co-founder and CEO Dr. Garry Cooper Jr. the single highest-funded Black entrepreneur in climate tech in the city of Chicago.
“As a Black founder, I am proud to have achieved this funding milestone. However, the takeaway I want to emphasize is the fact that investors have recognized the incredible nature of the solution our team has built,” said Garry Cooper. “We are honored and energized by our investors’ support for our vision, and we can’t wait to keep building.”
“Ever since Garry’s winning pitch at our Rise of the Rest Equity Tour Pitch Competition in 2020, we’ve been excited by Rheaply’s momentum,” said Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution and co-founder of AOL. “Rheaply is not just scaling a great company in the ever-growing Chicago tech ecosystem, it is developing a critical solution for businesses that are trying to effectively use and recycle physical resources while also combating climate change.”
With this raise, the Chicago-based company intends to expand its work in the energy and utilities sector by building a community around circularity at Nicor Gas.
“At Nicor Gas, we are committed to being the energy industry leader in sustainability and are taking proactive steps to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to reach net-zero methane emissions from our operations by 2030,” said Meena Beyers, vice president of Community and Business Development at Nicor Gas. “We are proud to partner with Rheaply to implement solutions that align with our decarbonization goals and look forward to working together to reuse our existing resources and supplies to eliminate unnecessary waste.”
"Circularity and reuse are central to achieving net zero. Rheaply's technology has the potential to help every organization ‘close the loop’ by reducing unnecessary waste and avoiding additional GHG emissions. At Logitech, we are extremely excited about the future working with Rheaply," added Bracken Darrell, CEO of Logitech.
This news comes on the heels of several major Rheaply milestones, including the launch of the estimated embodied carbon avoidance feature and a partnership with the City of San Francisco and the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance.
To learn more about how Rheaply helps organizations strategically design and execute sustainability efforts, please visit rheaply.com.
About Rheaply
The Rheaply platform is a cloud-based resource exchange technology application for connecting people and organizations with resources, improving reuse outcomes, and catalyzing the circular economy. As the only market solution that combines an asset management system with an online marketplace, Rheaply’s platform enables organizations to exchange materials and resources more effectively, eliminating unnecessary waste, avoiding carbon emissions, and reducing spend. To learn more about Rheaply, visit rheaply.com or follow @RheaplyInc.
