United States-headquartered environmental sensing and data startup Clarity Movement has raised an additional $9.6 million in a Series A extension round co-led by repeat investor Amasia as well as Southeast Asia-focused Active Fund, according to its announcement on Wednesday.
Kickstart Ventures’ Active Fund is backed by Philippine Conglomerate Ayala Corporation and its subsidiaries AC Energy, AC Industrials, AC Ventures, BPI. The $180-million fund invests across four areas: a frictionless future, automation to augmentation, smarter living and resource allocation.
Amasia, the other co-lead investor, backs firms in the seed to Series B stage. Its investments include e-commerce marketplace GoTo, wallet exchange platform Coin.ph and online grocery platform Redmart.
With the latest round, Clarity Movement has raised a total of $14.6 million in its Series A round.
The latest round also saw participation from investors such as Spero Ventures, global VC SOSV’s HAX programme and American entrepreneur Jason Calacanis’ Launch Fund and VC, The Climate Syndicate.
Clarity Movement will deploy the fresh funds towards expanding its operations globally and accelerating its product development to address climate change, the company’s co-founder and CEO David Lu told DealStreetAsia.
This is as air pollution – a major contributor to climate change – is seen to cause more than 7 million deaths in a year, five times more than the number of people who die from car accidents, Lu explains.
He adds that the impact of air pollution is concentrated in rapidly industrialised regions like Southeast Asia.
Lu declined to comment on the platform’s valuation.
Founded in 2014 by Lu and Baljot Singh, Clarity Movement provides a complete, scalable air monitoring solution utilising hardware, software and expert services.
Clarity Movement’s networks are also able to incorporate add on modules to supplement the data collected with air pollutant measurements. The first three add-on modules, for wind, ozone, and black carbon, were introduced in 2021 in response to customer demand.
Clarity nodes – the platform’s flagship particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide monitor – offers reliable and accurate results using solar power and cellular communication.
Thousands of Clarity nodes have been installed in over 60 countries, including Singapore, Philippines, United Kingdom and the United States. Customers include cities, states, school districts, mining companies and ports.
For instance, the company is working the Quezon City Government in the Philippines to expand air quality monitoring to marginalised and vulnerable communities through its Clarity nodes.
“We realised that 24 Clarity nodes would cost the same as it takes to maintain one mile of highway for a single year. At relatively low cost, governments and businesses can determine the kind of pollutants in the air, the concentration of these pollutants, and where they are coming from,” said Ramanan Raghavendran, Managing Partner at Amasia.
