“We need the tools to solve climate change and we need them quickly”

Mike Hanrahan, FCA and Chair of Sustain.Life, tells Accountancy Ireland why carbon accounting capability is becoming a must-have for suppliers to big corporations 

Wexford-born Chartered Accountant Mike Hanrahan is Chair and co-founder of Sustain.Life, the innovative tech start-up behind a software-as-a-service platform that helps companies decarbonise their operations.

Sustain.Life combines environmental, sustainable and governance (ESG) and carbon accounting tools so companies of all sizes can better manage and mitigate carbon emissions while also cutting costs.

Based in New Jersey in the US, Hanrahan launched Sustain.Life in 2021 with co-founders Annalee Bloomfield and Patrick Campagnano, and is now gearing up to scale the company globally.

Here, he talks to Accountancy Ireland about the professional path that has taken him from Ireland to London and the US, and from a career in accounting to banking and finance, e-commerce and, now, sustainable entrepreneurship.

Tell us about Sustain.Life. How did the company come about? 

Before I established Sustain.Life, I co-founded the e-commerce company Jet.com in the US with two guys, Marc Lore and Nate Faust. 

By that stage, I had moved to the US, but before that I worked in London having trained as a Chartered Accountant with PwC in Ireland. 

I started working in The City in the mid-nineties when I was in my early twenties and moved from risk management into technology, building risk and trading systems for banks.

Marc Lore was my boss while I was working at Credit Suisse. He became a great mentor and, when he moved to the US to set up his first e-commerce start-up, I agreed to move over as well to work with him.

We subsequently set up Jet.com together. I was the company’s Chief Technology Officer and when we sold Jet.com to Walmart in 2013, I became Chief Executive of Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab.

That’s where I met Annalee Bloomfield and Patrick Campagnano. Annalee was Head of Product and Customer Experience and Patrick was Head of Engineering.

We had all this expertise in building scalable, accessible technologies that could meet market needs and we could see the challenges Walmart’s suppliers were facing trying to adhere to its ESG standards and requirements. 

We wanted to make sustainability more accessible – to democratise it – for smaller companies in the supply chain.

Climate change is humanity’s greatest threat and, together, SMEs account for a significant amount of the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.

We need the tools to enable more organisations to take meaningful climate action – and we need them quickly. That’s what Sustain.Life is all about.

How does Sustain.Life work? How does the platform make it easier for SMEs to be more sustainable? 

Big corporations like Walmart tend to have the resources they need to invest in sustainability programmes whereas SMEs don’t. 

It’s much more difficult to introduce carbon accounting and climate action programmes in a small company where you have less money and fewer people.

That was our starting point for Sustain.Life and the sizable market need we are addressing with the platform.

Sustain.Life gives SMEs who don’t have in-house expertise the tools they need to start measuring the environmental impact of their internal operations and supply chains. 
It helps them understand how to manage and reduce their emissions by introducing operational changes in areas like energy, water and waste.

The platform is also designed to help them comply with reporting frameworks, even as they are evolving in different jurisdictions, and allows them to report their sustainability progress to customers, investors and employees using verifiable data. 

Tell us about your interest in sustainable business, and in using technology to help combat climate change. 

I have been passionate about sustainability for a long time, really since I first moved to the US in 2010.

Prior to that, I hadn’t really understood some of the psychology around climate change and the power of the fossil fuel industry on people’s thinking here in the US.

It was so different to what I had experienced in Europe. I found that quite a lot of people here didn’t take climate change seriously and didn’t see it as a critical threat.

That was very worrying. Climate change is barrelling at us really quickly and we need to act now. 

Back then, I think there was still wider optimism that climate change was a problem we could solve relatively easily.

It’s not. Energy is at the heart of our entire global economy and fossil fuels power a large percentage of our energy. The threat is enormous and it is complex.

We need to find solutions to electrify the global economy and that is going to take many years. 

We have to invest money now and start to move very quickly if we are going to get ourselves into a position where we can stop the rot and figure out how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through carbon capture and other means.

What is the state-of-play now in the US regarding efforts to curb climate change and where does Sustain.Life fit in? 

When we were starting Sustain.Life, we saw two big potential drivers in the US for a carbon accounting platform: sustainability in the supply chain and regulation, either at state or federal level.

Both predictions are starting to materialise. In October, a new law was approved in California requiring big corporations with annual revenues of over $1 billion to report greenhouse gas emissions.

We have also recently started to see some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies introduce new policies requiring companies in their supply chain to be able to report on, and set goals for, their own carbon emissions.

Amazon, Microsoft and Costco have all now introduced these policies. We already had experience of this at Walmart, which introduced Project Gigaton back in 2017 with the aim of reducing or avoiding one billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gasses from its global value chain by 2030.

When we were out raising money for Sustain.Life, we were telling the venture capitalists that smaller companies supplying the Big Fortune 500 corporations like Walmart, Amazon and Costco would be out of business within a few years if they were unable to report on their carbon emissions. 

It’s wonderful to see that sea change starting to happen in reality.

You launched Sustain.Life in November 2021. Tell us about the development of the business so far.

The version of the platform that went live in late 2021 was our MVP. Our revenue function kicked in early in the second quarter of 2022 and that’s really when we were ready to start selling into enterprises.

For most of 2022, if you were to ask me what was keeping me up at night – it was wondering if we had timed the company right. We knew companies would need this technology, but you still have those questions: Are we too early? Is this demand going to materialise as we had anticipated?

Now, I feel really good about both how our product and our market is developing. We’re able to go toe-to-toe with our competitors and that’s really important because our market is extremely competitive.

There are new entrants nearly every week and we’re up against big enterprise players offering solutions in this space like Microsoft and Salesforce.

We come up against these guys all the time and we seem to be able to beat them out.
The market opportunity is massive and we’re ready to scale. We already have US customers in sectors like food and beverage, electric vehicles and fintech. We also work a lot in the US with accounting firms. We have some great accounting partners.

What is the plan now for Sustain.Life? What is your strategy for the company over the next 12 months? 

Our biggest focus right now is on internationalisation and tailoring the platform for the needs of different markets.

It’s a complex process because you need to be able to support different currencies and units of measurement. Calculating carbon emissions requires a lot of different data sets – but we’re ready. 

Our product is mature, as is our team, so our main focus now is on sales and building strong partner channels in different markets.

Our first test market will be Australia, where we already have salespeople. Once our model is bedded down there, the plan is to copy it very quickly in other markets.

In Europe, a big focus for us will be the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and Ireland – in particular, Ireland’s accounting sector – is very much in our sights.

*Interview by Elaine O’Regan