Corporations worldwide are committing to shrinking their carbon footprints. But it can get complicated when companies try to calculate how much carbon they’re responsible for, and figure out how to cut those emissions.
Muir AI wants to help.
The Seattle-based startup is tackling that challenge by combining satellite technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Some carbon calculations are relatively easy, like how much electricity a business consumes and the fuel use of company vehicles.
But it gets tricky to assess carbon impacts less directly in a corporation’s control, such as the footprint of supply chain goods.
“What we’re doing is developing these models to address the core data gap that exists today,” said CEO and co-founder Harris Chalat.
The importance of getting the information right is huge. This category of emissions, called scope 3, are often the largest part of a company’s climate debt. For Amazon, for example, scope 3 emissions represented 78% of its carbon footprint in 2021.
Corporations typically have two ways to get data for their supply chain emissions: rely on less-accurate estimates for the emissions, or pursue a more labor-intensive approach of going directly to supply chain providers to try to get information.
Muir is trying to create a third option that provides granular information through their platform. With better data, companies know where the biggest carbon contributions come from, and can adjust their supply chain to make meaningful progress toward climate goals.
If corporations had more accurate scope 3 data, they could optimize their efforts to reduce emissions and adjust supply chain operations, which could shave 7% off global emissions, Chalat said, citing research.
Chalat and Peter Williams, Muir’s co-founder and chief technology officer, are excited by the company’s potential impact.
The two met as undergraduates at MIT. Chalat worked at aerospace companies SpaceX and Relativity Space, focusing on satellite technology. Williams was also an aerospace engineer and has a passion for applying AI and ML to data. He worked at Amazon for more than six years before launching Muir.
“We’re able to apply a lot of what we learned in our previous work experiences to try and solve this problem in a new and unique way…”
In recent years, both grew increasingly troubled by the harm they were seeing from climate change, including year-after-year of wildfires on the West Coast. They wanted to help address the crisis.
“It was pretty obvious to me that [climate] is a space that can be more meaningful than getting people their packages faster — which is a really fun, complex problem to solve, but not necessarily the most important problem that we can be solving right now,” Williams said.
They launched Muir in February 2022. The startup participated in Madrona Venture Labs’ accelerator, and raised a $500,000 pre-seed round led by Madrona Venture Labs and Soma Capital. One of their advisors is Kelci Zile, a partner at Madrona Venture Labs and former lead for sustainability solutions on the AWS Marketplace and Data Exchange. The company’s third employee is Amy Fisher, director of sustainability partnerships.
Muir is currently demoing its technology with early customers, and hopes to have a publicly available product out later this year.
There are dozens of companies working in carbon accounting and analytics and carbon fintech. That includes Carbon Direct, which has offices in Seattle and New York, and Scope 5, a Seattle-based startup that was recently acquired.
Additional companies in the U.S. include Persefoni, Measurabl, Cleartrace and Watershed, plus others internationally.
The Muir team said it has something different to contribute to the space.
“We’re able to apply a lot of what we learned in our previous work experiences to try and solve this problem in a new and unique way that we really think can change the course on climate,” Williams said.
