Startup profile: GreenIRR
- Founded by: Celine King
- Year founded: 2022
- Headquarters: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Sector: Transportation
- Funding and valuation: $2 million raised
- Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners
When GreenIRR founder and CEO Celine King talks to potential customers in the trucking industry, there’s one word she doesn’t lead with.
“Never ‘sustainability,’” King told Technical.ly.
GreenIRR (pronounced “Greener”) tracks emissions, fuel consumption and vehicle performance. Although sustainability is a priority for her, she’s found that for most trucking companies, the appeal is less about environmental goals than keeping customers, winning new business and cutting operating costs.
“The majority of the conversation that we have is centered around customer retention, revenue uplift, and then efficiency,” King said. “Actually, we substitute the word sustainability with ‘efficiency’.”
“The more that we help these fleets reduce their fuel consumption, they’re … more profitable and more sustainable.”
Celine King, GreenIRR
It seems to be working. The startup has moved its headquarters from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to CIC Philadelphia in University City and closed a $2 million pre-seed round, its first and only funding round, with backing from Ben Franklin Technology Partners.
After starting by focusing primarily on individual trucking fleets, King said GreenIRR is now building for major shippers. These customers could deploy the platform across entire networks of contracted carriers, potentially giving the company a role in how emissions data moves through supply chains.
“We want to make sure that the sustainable and efficient carriers are being rewarded for their performance,” King said. “There’s this bigger goal as it relates to overturning this legacy dynamic of a race-to-the-bottom in terms of price.”
A climate startup goes looking for a market
King grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. She went to Fairfield University expecting to become a veterinarian.
She studied biology and business analytics and did climate-change research for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Later, she worked at renewable energy investment firm Greenbacker Capital, which invests in solar, wind and other clean energy infrastructure.
By then, her career goal had shifted.
“After deciding that I wasn’t going to be a veterinarian, the obsession became having as big of a positive impact on the environment as possible,” King said.
The idea that became GreenIRR emerged through Fairfield’s entrepreneurship program around 2022, but the original company was different from the one King runs today.
At the time, ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing was booming. GreenIRR initially targeted investors who wanted better environmental data to understand whether their portfolios were on track with long-term decarbonization goals. It didn’t gain traction.The company began looking for an industry with stronger built-in reasons to both measure emissions and reduce them.
Transportation stood out.
“We needed to be focused on a segment where there was natural incentive to reduce emissions, where there was pressure to measure and report, whether that was regulatory or existing market forces,” King said.
There is currently no broad federal requirement for trucking fleets to report their greenhouse gas emissions, and the SEC’s federal corporate climate-disclosure rules remain on hold as the agency moves to rescind them. Instead, much of the pressure is coming from state laws such as California’s SB 253, which requires companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue that do business in the state to disclose their emissions beginning in 2027.
The cost of fuel provides another incentive. Burning less diesel reduces both a fleet’s carbon footprint and one of its major operating expenses.
“The more that we help these fleets reduce their fuel consumption, they’re becoming more profitable and more sustainable,” King said. “And then we’re capturing the data to tell that story.”
Moving up the supply chain
Entering trucking also challenged some of King’s assumptions about the industry.
“Almost everything is pen and paper, which was a shock for me,” she said.
That doesn’t mean that fleet operators lack knowledge. “Just because they’re not using sophisticated systems for tracking and monitoring doesn’t mean that they’re not sophisticated individuals,” King said, tapping her head. “It’s just all up here.”
The bigger challenge was convincing customers to introduce another system into operations where margins are already thin and disruptions can be costly. “The ROI that a new technology has to bring needs to be significant,” King said.
Unlike some things, software aimed at sustainability may not be an obvious necessity.
“There’s not a budget for whatever you’re pitching,” King said. “It’s not a new tire. It’s not a new truck.”
GreenIRR tries to minimize that disruption by using technology fleets already have. The platform integrates with telematics systems, which collect information directly from vehicles, including everything from mileage and fuel consumption to driver and vehicle performance, as well as fuel-card transactions. Combining those data sources allows GreenIRR to calculate emissions while also looking for ways fleets can operate more efficiently.
GreenIRR also integrates with Geotab, a telematics provider that collects commercial fleet vehicle and driver data. For fleets already using Geotab, GreenIRR can use that existing data to calculate emissions and identify fuel-efficiency trends without additional vehicle hardware.
“Geotab started as an integration partner, and then we became stickier and stickier with them over time,” King said. “They’re our strongest channel and distribution partner as well.”
GreenIRR’s expansion toward major shippers will require the company to build beyond the product it developed for individual fleets.
King said the startup plans to use its new funding to expand sales and business development and build products aimed more directly at shippers. The team is also working on several AI-related projects that it plans to push forward over the next 18 months.
Working with fleets, she said, has changed how she interprets the industry’s reluctance to talk about sustainability.
“It’s not that they don’t care,” King said. “They just don’t have the time to.”
