2022 was a big year for climate professionals – with landmark legislations like the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the United States, a growing portion of corporations opting in to voluntary climate disclosure, and an influx of new talent and investment in climate technology and solutions. With so much happening in our industry we wanted to take the time to celebrate our collective wins.
At Optera, we’re particularly proud of our achievements in three key areas of our business: our customer impact, our product innovation, and our Optera team. As we wrap up 2022, we hope you’ll join us in celebrating these wins and looking forward to even more progress in 2023!
Customer impact
Everything we do at Optera – from the product we build, to the team we hire – is in service of our mission to enable thousands of companies across the globe to transition to net zero by 2050. So first and foremost, we need to celebrate our clients. Whether you’re early on in your climate calculation journey or are already making significant progress in transitioning your business to a decarbonized model, we salute the work you’re doing and the progress you’ve made this year.
Customer growth of 4x means greater emissions impact
A big part of how we define success at Optera is how we help scale our customers’ success across geographies and industries – bringing more corporations into the fold to drive meaningful climate action. In 2022 alone, Optera quadrupled our number of customers, tracking more than 225 million metric tonnes of CO2e* across 84,000 locations in the Optera platform by the end of the year. And 60 percent of those Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions have been verified by a third party auditor. We are not only enabling climate action at scale, but also maintaining a high level of quality for all of the metrics and data our clients manage.
For Scope 3 in particular, our customers have onboarded thousands of suppliers into the Optera platform, using primary data to inform their Scope 3 Purchased Goods & Services emissions calculations. Globally, these suppliers make up more than $187 billion in supply chain spend for Optera’s customers.
Partners scale carbon accounting and climate solutions across their networks
We’re particularly excited about the work many of our customers and partners are doing to scale best practices and climate action across their industries, value chains, and networks. One of our clients, a leading growth-focused private capital firm, has developed a program to support its portfolio companies with economies of scale. They’ve created a Climate Action Playbook to standardize emissions accounting, target setting, and achievement roadmap development across numerous funds, industry types, and asset classes. With our help, they set one of the first Science-Based Targets aligned with SBTi’s Private Equity guidance. Finally, they secured 15,000 renewable energy certificates to support their portfolio companies’ emissions reduction efforts.
Our partnership with the Responsible Business Alliance is another example of scaled network programs. By offering Optera’s technology to more than 200 of its core corporate members and tens of thousands of their suppliers worldwide, the RBA is making it easier for suppliers to contribute to carbon reporting across their customer base, leading to industry-wide supply chain emissions reporting. This work will help accelerate decarbonization efforts across the global electronics industry, and we are proud to be helping drive this scale.
Product innovation
This year, we’re also proud of the work our team has done to deepen and innovate on our product offering. In June, we launched our Investments product to help financial institutions quickly build a comprehensive view of emissions across their investment portfolio. Investors can input primary emissions data for their assets where they have it, and estimate based on custom proxy lists where they don’t – enabling faster insights for where to focus their mitigation efforts. It was a privilege to work with some of the largest private equity funds in the world on this product.
Optera also achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification for our Information Security Management System this year, a designation that validates the rigor and maturity of our cybersecurity and information security program. We know how critical it is to our clients that their data remains secure and protected, so going through this certification process was an important win in demonstrating our dedication to this program.
The Optera team
And we’d be nowhere without the amazing Optera team. We added 30 new team members this year, growing overall team size by more than 250%. A keen focus on our values meant that even with massive growth, we were able to maintain and improve Optera’s unique, people-first culture – an achievement we were recognized for when we were named one of Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work in November.
Beyond growing in size, our team was dedicated to growing personally and professionally this year. More than 90% of the team participated in extracurricular professional development programs in 2022, ranging from ESG credentials like ACCO’s Certified Climate Change Professional program, SASB’s Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting, and GHG Institute’s 201 Basics of Organizational GHG Accounting, to software development courses like TalkPython and Eat the Blocks’s web3 development course, to management skills development like LifeLabs Learning’s Coaching Skills Workshop and TMI Consulting’s Managing Remote Teams training.
We also renewed our focus on our values and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) at Optera, forming employee-lead committees for both values and JEDI principles this year. Following a case competition with brilliant students from University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, we further defined what JEDI principles mean to Optera specifically – more on that coming soon!
Finally, as a hybrid team, we were thrilled to be able to welcome new team members, talk strategy, and get to know each other in person at our annual team gathering in Boulder, Colorado in August. It’s been another “roller coaster” ride this year…and we can’t wait to see how the team, product, and our impact grow as we enter next year!
Want to join the ride? Check out our Careers page for the latest job openings!
*Metric tonnes of CO2e includes only Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions aligned with the GHG Protocol – only the emissions allocated to our customers and not including any avoided or forecasted emissions.
