How Mantaray Climate helped Techstars Australia reduce Demo Day emissions

Techstars portfolio company co-founder Rujuta Natu was able to use her product Mantaray Climate to reduce the emissions impact of Techstars’ Australia’s flagship Demo Day, and completely offset all emissions.

Rujuta Natu is on a mission.

The former lawyer turned technology startup founder has found an important gap in the crowded marketplace of carbon emissions tracking and offsetting.

Her product, Mantaray Climate, is designed for SMEs who want to reduce the carbon impact of their businesses, but can’t afford expensive consultants or an in-house sustainability team to do the work for them.

From living the problem to solving the problem

Mantaray Climate was born from Rujuta’s own experience when, as a corporate lawyer, she put her hand up to help with her employer’s emissions reduction plan. 

“I quickly discovered what a nightmare it was to manually collect supplier sustainability information. It was a manual job that involved typing hundreds and thousands of supplier details into a spreadsheet. It took months to gather all the data, and by the time we finished, it was already out of date. That’s when I started asking other sustainability managers how they were addressing this – and it turned out, they were doing the exact same thing even though this meant they spent their entire time gathering data rather than actually acting on it.”

Even though the main pressures to set net zero commitments may initially fall on large companies, Rujuta’s experience showed her that large companies would need to extract information from SME suppliers, who wouldn’t have the systems or dedicated staff in place to respond.

“These small businesses who were having to respond to our requests – but many didn’t even know what information we were asking for. I realised that it was a huge ask for them to have to record, report and reduce their emissions to keep their big corporate client happy.”

The new climate disclosure regulations coming into effect next year will only make the carbon reporting demands on small business owners more onerous. 

Putting SMEs in control of emissions (and emissions reduction)

Mantaray Climate provides a simple and cost-effective solution for SMEs who need to report their carbon emissions, as well as those who want to take action to reduce their emissions.

Source: Supplied

It does this by collating supplier-level data and allowing SMEs to link their bank feed and instantly see the carbon footprint that their business creates. Business owners can then compare the environmental impact of their current suppliers against more sustainable alternatives, and reduce their emissions by choosing more sustainable suppliers. 

Mantaray’s approach is different from existing emissions tracking products, which typically only offer industry-level estimates of the carbon impact based on the company’s spend. This might help SMEs determine the size of their business’s carbon footprint, but it doesn’t give them the levers to be able to reduce their footprint.

The benefits of Mantaray’s platform don’t stop at carbon emissions. Mantaray charges a fraction of the cost of enterprise carbon tracking solutions or sustainability consultants, and their customer research has found that SMEs will save up to $200,000 worth of time and money that is currently sunk into their manual carbon accounting processes. 

Creating a sustainable tech accelerator 

Mantaray Climate was selected as one of 12 companies to take part in the inaugural Techstars Tech Central Sydney Accelerator powered by the NSW Government.

In addition to participating in the program, Mantaray Climate also partnered with the local arm of the world’s largest pre-seed investor, bringing Techstars Australia on as a pilot customer of the Mantaray platform.

The challenge? Create the most sustainable event for Techstars Tech Central Sydney’s flagship Demo Day event.

Demo Days are typically big, flashy affairs – where startup founders pitch from the stage to win support from mentors and investors to help them grow their businesses. 

Using Mantaray’s platform, the Techstars Tech Central team was able to choose more sustainable options for our suppliers. By making smarter choices on catering, materials, and low-plastic signage, we were able to reduce the emissions from the event by a massive 21%. We even surveyed our participants on their transport to and from the event, and offset those emissions too.

Making sustainable choices didn’t slow us down (Techstars operates like a startup, too!), and it didn’t break the bank. In fact, we actually found that the sustainable choice often ended up being the cheaper choice.

Kirstin Hunter is the managing director (NSW) at Techstars.