The Story of Persefoni: Building the TurboTax for Carbon Accounting

Sometimes the most transformative companies are born from an insider’s view of a broken system. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kentaro Kawamori shared how his journey from esports to energy led to building Persefoni, a company revolutionizing how businesses handle carbon accounting.

From Gaming to Green Tech Kentaro’s path to climate tech was anything but direct. “I started my career, oddly enough, in esports way before people were making a million bucks playing games,” he recalls. After roles at VMware, Red Hat, and Microsoft, he found himself at Accenture doing digital transformation work. But it was his next move that would prove pivotal.

Taking the role of Chief Digital Officer at Chesapeake Energy, a Fortune 500 natural gas and oil producer, might seem an unlikely choice for someone passionate about sustainability. But for Kentaro, it was strategic. “If I was ever going to be able to do any work or be able to orient my career in technology, especially towards the cause, then understanding the big emissions problem from the inside out would be a critical part of that journey,” he explains.

The Spreadsheet Problem At Chesapeake, Kentaro discovered a critical gap in how companies handled carbon accounting. Despite being required to report emissions to the EPA, most companies relied on spreadsheets. “Even to this day, the vast majority of companies do that with spreadsheets, which one is of course phenomenally inefficient, but two is quite concerning if you think about that from a data accuracy and reliability and trust perspective,” he notes.

This realization coincided with a broader market shift. As Kentaro explains, “We started seeing the early signs of the market pressures and the macro creating a category and creating a market here. That was when this shifted from being an environmental agenda and a pollution oriented agenda only to investors perking up.”

Building the Solution Founded in January 2020, Persefoni’s timing proved impeccable. “A mere days after we incorporated the company, Larry Fink of BlackRock came out with his annual CEO letter,” Kentaro recalls. This letter, declaring climate risk as financial risk, catalyzed the market.

Persefoni’s approach was to make carbon accounting as systematic as financial accounting. “Think of that very similar to what financial accounting does. It takes in a wide variety of data sources…Same exact concept for carbon accounting,” Kentaro explains. This familiar framework helped companies understand and adopt their solution.

The strategy worked. Persefoni grew from about a dozen customers at the beginning of 2022 to over 200 by early 2023, with expectations to multiply that further.

The Road Ahead Looking to the future, Kentaro sees a pivotal three-year period ahead as major financial regulators worldwide implement mandated climate disclosure frameworks. “The SEC is finalizing theirs. It’ll be published in April. The EU’s climate disclosure regulation starts going into effect in January 1, 2024,” he notes.

Persefoni’s vision extends beyond being just another software company. “We want to become one of the most prolific and the most trusted name in terms of transparency, in terms of data quality, all of the things that really engender trust for our customers, stakeholders,” Kentaro shares. He envisions Persefoni becoming “one of the first, if not the first, standalone successful climate software company in the public markets.”

For Kentaro, this journey represents more than building a successful company—it’s about creating infrastructure for the climate transition. As regulatory frameworks evolve and market demands increase, Persefoni stands poised to help companies navigate the complex world of carbon accounting, turning their founding thesis into market reality.