Tangible wants to scale up construction decarbonization

The real estate industry is a bit of a greenhouse gas powerhouse, responsible for 40% of all global emissions. A quarter of that comes from building materials, and Tangible has had enough. The company is building a tool for finding, managing and reporting on lower-carbon, more sustainable, building materials, and just closed a $3 million seed round to fulfill that mission.

Tangible today announced it has raised $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by early-stage construction tech investor Foundamental, and Fifty Years (which led the company’s previously undisclosed pre-seed round). Redstone Built World Fund, Pi Labs, Asymmetric and Deco Ventures participated in the round, as well.

The Tangible platform has been designed to support sustainability and development managers who use it as a tool to find low-carbon materials, drawn primarily from global environmental product declarations, which the company says are all third-party verified. Materials can then be added to a project and the impact aggregated; the results are sharable, which gives developers a view of all their projects, the materials being used and the environmental and health impact. Tangible is also pushing for transparency: Users can share the information with their customers and investors to demonstrate the changes being made on the ground.

“We’re using the funding to grow the product team and continue developing the platform. We’ve been co-developing the platform with a select group of customers, so we’re scaling up for our full launch later this year,” says Anneli Tostar in an interview with TechCrunch. She co-founded the company alongside Nicole Granath. “We raised $3 million in this round, bringing the total we’ve raised to $4 million — all equity.”

The company declined to comment on the valuation for this round.

“We’re excited to develop Tangible and fully launch the platform into the North American market. This market alone is worth around $72 billion — with hundreds of thousands of developers and construction managers who would benefit from using Tangible to report embodied carbon for construction projects,” explains Tostar. “The long-term vision is a full-stack platform for sustainable construction. In the future, people will be able to use Tangible to track projects, see case studies from other organizations, order more sustainable materials, and provide the tools to decarbonize the construction industry at large.”

The industry already has LEED, but Tangible doesn’t believe that is enough to get to climate impact.