Banyan, an investment facilitator for sustainable infrastructure headquartered in San Francisco, has raised $8.2m in Series A funding, seeing the company valued at $47m.
The round was led by VoLo Earth Ventures with several notable venture capital firms joining the round.
Banyan said that despite the advances in availability of asset and financial data, investing in sustainable infrastructure remains a largely manual and inefficient set of processes relying heavily on spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
The company’s platform for project finance and sustainable infrastructure teams, sets out to tackle this issue by providing online checklists and scorecards, approval-based workflow automation, APIs to existing data sources, a centralised data vault to complement existing virtual datarooms, and a self-service client portal.
Since its inception, Banyan has helped to deploy and manage over $1bn of capital towards sustainable infrastructure developments. However, set against the backdrop of rising climate concerns, as well as a more concerted global effort by major institutions and nation states to address environmental challenges, the demand for such projects continues to rise.
Banyan said the funding will enable it to further scale its market engine and enhance the support its able to offer its customers.
Will Greene, founder and CEO at Banyan, said, “The face of infrastructure projects is changing. While the era of megaprojects is far from over, developments are generally becoming smaller and cheaper. However, the cost and complexity of lending or investing has hardly changed. In response, infrastructure companies are increasingly interested in solutions to help manage growing pipelines and portfolios and take advantage of this market opportunity.”
Earlier this month, five of the world’s leading banks joined the sustainable finance alliance, Alliance for Green Commercial Banks, to catalyse the financial innovation, investment and leading practices in emerging markets that are urgently needed to address climate and environmental risks.
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