#180 Climatta: Planet Vs. Money
Episode
41 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Investing, Startups
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Go-to-market mismatch: Climatta initially targeted Chief Sustainability Officers, who feel the pain but lack budget authority. The actual decision-makers are CFOs and COOs. Founders selling sustainability-adjacent products should map budget authority before building outreach sequences — routing through the wrong stakeholder adds months of delay and kills deal velocity in enterprise sales cycles.
- ✓Pitch framing pivot: After the pitch, Inaki recognized that positioning Climatta as a "sustainability platform" creates a messaging gap — sustainability teams feel the pain but can't sign, finance can sign but doesn't feel the pain. Reframing the product as an operating cost optimizer that improves profit margins and cash flow directly addresses CFO language and unlocks budget.
- ✓Invoice-as-data-source: Climatta extracts up to 24 months of utility data in under five minutes by scraping utility provider portals directly using customer credentials — no APIs exist in this industry. From invoice data alone, the software identifies tax deductions, power factor penalties (up to 100% of invoice value), and peak-shaving opportunities without requiring any on-site hardware installation.
- ✓Warm cold outreach ladder: Inaki's enterprise sales method involves emailing senior leadership at target companies asking who handles energy management — regardless of whether that person is the decision-maker. If they redirect, he uses their name as a warm introduction to the correct contact. This two-step sequence converts cold outreach into warm referrals within the same organization.
- ✓Venture vs. lifestyle business tension: Climatta generated roughly $90K ARR across five enterprise customers in nearly two years. Investors flagged that diminishing returns risk exists once clients implement identified savings — year-two retention becomes unclear. Founders in efficiency-based SaaS should validate multi-year expansion revenue (new modules, success fees) before raising venture capital, or risk failing the venture-scale test entirely.
What It Covers
Inaki, CEO of Climatta, pitches four VCs for $750K at a $5.5M post-money valuation, presenting software that analyzes utility invoices to identify energy cost savings for enterprise manufacturing, retail, and commercial real estate clients — revealing $300B in annual corporate overspending hidden in unread utility bills.
Key Questions Answered
- •Go-to-market mismatch: Climatta initially targeted Chief Sustainability Officers, who feel the pain but lack budget authority. The actual decision-makers are CFOs and COOs. Founders selling sustainability-adjacent products should map budget authority before building outreach sequences — routing through the wrong stakeholder adds months of delay and kills deal velocity in enterprise sales cycles.
- •Pitch framing pivot: After the pitch, Inaki recognized that positioning Climatta as a "sustainability platform" creates a messaging gap — sustainability teams feel the pain but can't sign, finance can sign but doesn't feel the pain. Reframing the product as an operating cost optimizer that improves profit margins and cash flow directly addresses CFO language and unlocks budget.
- •Invoice-as-data-source: Climatta extracts up to 24 months of utility data in under five minutes by scraping utility provider portals directly using customer credentials — no APIs exist in this industry. From invoice data alone, the software identifies tax deductions, power factor penalties (up to 100% of invoice value), and peak-shaving opportunities without requiring any on-site hardware installation.
- •Warm cold outreach ladder: Inaki's enterprise sales method involves emailing senior leadership at target companies asking who handles energy management — regardless of whether that person is the decision-maker. If they redirect, he uses their name as a warm introduction to the correct contact. This two-step sequence converts cold outreach into warm referrals within the same organization.
- •Venture vs. lifestyle business tension: Climatta generated roughly $90K ARR across five enterprise customers in nearly two years. Investors flagged that diminishing returns risk exists once clients implement identified savings — year-two retention becomes unclear. Founders in efficiency-based SaaS should validate multi-year expansion revenue (new modules, success fees) before raising venture capital, or risk failing the venture-scale test entirely.
Notable Moment
Six months after receiving no investment offers, Inaki voluntarily paused fundraising despite having only 310K committed. Rather than dilute equity prematurely, he returned to operations to find product-market fit — a counterintuitive move that contradicts the typical founder instinct to raise at all costs.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the pitch where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. I'm Lisa Muccio. And I'm Josh Muccio. Changing things up this morning. On the show today, we have Inaki with Klamada. He's raising 750 k. So people care about the planet. Right? In theory, yes. No. They don't. You know what they care about? What? Money. People care about money. That's true. I mean, we wanna care about the planet, but we're just not incentivized to do so. Especially if it's a huge corporation. Enter today's founder, Inaki, who is an outdoorsman. He cares a lot about the environment and wants to sneakily save our planet by helping large corporations save money on their energy bills by way of hundreds of millions of dollars. The question is, can saving the planet be a venture scale business? I mean, in theory, it's a big planet. The pitch for Klamada is coming up after this. And if you wanna join us for the live taping of season 16, we are gonna be in Tampa this April. Learn more about our upcoming show at pitch.show/tampa. And if you're a founder, apply to pitch @ pitch.show/apply. Support for the pitch comes from Adobe. Life is unpredictable. So is your work. You need a system that adapts with whatever gets thrown at you. That means mastering the ability to pivot and collaborate with others to reach your goals. Adobe gets that, which is why they made a tool that's just as flexible as you are. PDF spaces in Acrobat. Your PDF files are no longer static. Instead, they're living documents that flex with you and your project's needs. Learn more at adobe.com/dothatwithacrobat. Welcome back to the pitch for Klamada. Let's meet the investors. Elizabeth Yen with hustle fund. Can I ask you a very direct question? Jesse Middleton with Flybridge. I'm so sick of people that are building stuff for building stuff sake. Laura Lucas with Latitude Ventures. You are everything I am looking for in a founder. And Mike Ma with Sidecut Ventures. Come on, guys. Like, what kind of risk are you looking for? You don't wanna overthink a deal. Hello, everybody. Hi. How are you? Elizabeth. Hi, Mike. Nice meeting you, Mike. It's a pleasure. Hi. How are you guys? Good. Good. Welcome. Thank you. So my name is Inaki, and I am cofounder and CEO of Kymata. The first and best memory that I have being outdoors is going duck hunting with my dad. When I am 11 years old, I wake up at three in the morning to get all of the things into the truck, and then we drive just one hour away from home. When we get into the lake, the energy of all of the hunters is incredible. It's pitch dark. And in order to get to our spot, we have to get into a canoe. The average temperature is five degrees Fahrenheit, and we have to break the ice as we are crossing …
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