Interview With Alex Cooper, Co-founder of Pathways
Get ready! Because Eqvista is back with another exciting edition of the Founder Spotlight Interview! This time, we bring you Alex Cooper, the brilliant Co-Founder of Pathways. This revolutionary platform automates the creation of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building materials using AI technology. With Pathways, you can save up to 75% of your time creating EPDs – talk about a game-changer! Join us as we embark on an exhilarating journey with Alex and discover the magic behind Pathways. Keep reading to find out more!
What inspired you to create Pathways, and what problem were you aiming to solve problems in the manufacturing industry?
Pathways was born from my cofounder, Leise, and my research into the problem of embodied carbon in the built world at Harvard and MIT. Leise’s background is in industrial sustainability strategy, while I’ve spent my career in technology and data analytics.
We were interested in creating technology to address the climate crisis, and ID’d the built world as a substantial driver of emissions (40% of global CO2!), but one that was seriously underserved by technology. Our research revealed that, while there was growing demand from builders to incorporate embodied carbon into their plans, the existing data, the Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) from manufacturers, is far too limited.
Much of this data is gathered and analyzed very manually, and so it makes sense that manufacturers have been slow to create and publish LCAs. Having built consumer technology, I was particularly shocked by how difficult it was to use software for the manufacturing space.
At its core, our vision is to make Pathways so simple to deploy and use, that LCA disclosures become another, standard technical spec of manufactured products, akin to cost, weight, and PSI.
Can you explain how Pathways simplifies the creation of product life cycle analyses for manufacturers?
Our technology sits on top of manufacturers’ data stack, integrating across procurement and operational data, so that there is no need to manually gather data. Through these data feeds, we can create and maintain a real-time LCA model, basically an environmental digital twin, of a manufacturers’ production process.
This makes it much easier to create required documentation like Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). But our software turns this data into environmental intelligence,helping manufacturers identify the sources of their emissions and prioritize initiatives to reduce environmental impact.
How do Pathways use AI-enabled technologies to integrate across operations and provide insights into the impact of environmental emissions?
We’re constantly looking for ways to apply novel technologies to solve some of the very underserved challenges in the manufacturing industry. To that end, we’re experimenting with AI in a couple of different ways.
First, we’re deploying AI-technologies to parse and ingest unstructured data sources that don’t live in manufacturers’ data stack, like invoices or written documentation.
We’re also testing Gen-AI tools to surface more insights to manufacturers, breaking down what have historically been highly technical problems into easier to understand data.
What sets Pathways apart from other platforms or solutions in the market that address similar environmental concerns in manufacturing?
Today, most LCAs are conducted manually by a consultant – they can spend 3-6+months working with a manufacturer to manually gather and verify the data, and then feed it through a bespoke LCA model, built in excel or some custom modeling software like Simapro. These analyses are point-in-time, and quickly fall out of date if something changes in the supply chain or production process.
Where there has been innovation, it’s been in creating structured webforms with pre-verified models of manufacturers production processes. However these forms tend to only work for standardized manufacturing processes, like ready-mix concrete or asphalt.
Pathways takes a completely different approach – we view LCAs as a source of environmental intelligence, not a check-the-box exercise. We designed our software to both quickly create EPDs, but also to use that data as environmental intelligence and enable real carbon reduction and environmental improvement.
What are some of the key challenges you’ve encountered while developing and scaling Pathways, and how have you addressed them?
We are approaching LCAs in a fundamentally different way from consultants and academics – we are maintaining LCAs as environmental digital twins of the manufacturing process. Existing LCA modeling softwares was clunky and slow – we ended up building our Vibrant LCA software from the ground up to provide the performance and flexibility we needed to serve our customers.
We’re excited about this, because it means that, in addition to the time saved from data integrations, our modeling tools are much faster than anything on the market. This allows users to rapidly model and optimize scenarios. Ultimately, our vision is to turn LCA impacts into another technical spec for a building material product, akin to PSI, weight, or cost.
What are some of the metrics or indicators that Pathways uses to measure chemicals and carbon in product life cycle analyses?
Our LCA models are created and maintained based on the industry-defined Product Category Rules (PCRs) for a specific manufactured product. PCRs are the instruction manual, defining everything from which impact categories need to be measured, to how to actually analyze and process the data. While the impact categories can vary between PCRs, in general they include the following:
- Global Warming Potential – CO2 equivalents that contribute to global warming
- Acidification Potential – Sulfur equivalents that contribute to acid rain
- Eutrophication – Nitrogen equivalents leached that drive algae bloom
- Ozone Depletion – CFC equivalents that deplete the Ozone
- Smog Formation – O3 equivalents that create smog
Congratulations on raising $2.5 million for your company! Can you share more about the funding round?
We were incredibly excited by how this round came together. When we set out to raise our pre-seed, it was important to us that we be joined by investors that were aligned with our vision – to build the data layer to make manufacturing sustainable and decarbonize building materials – and that could help us accomplish that beyond an initial investment.
We ended up being pretty heavily oversubscribed, and were very intentional in which investors we brought in. The round was co-led by Zacua Ventures and Pi Labs, a contech and proptech fund, respectively. In addition to being great people, we were excited that their LP base represented our target customers – it confirmed that what we’re building is desperately needed.
We rounded out the round with great partners with expertise in climate tech, proptech, and B2B SAAS – folks who understand the varied complexities of our customer’s needs and business and have helped us think about building a platform to best serve them.
With this recent funding, how do you envision managing your cap table to ensure alignment with your startup’s growth?
We’re admittedly still in the earliest days here and are still deciding which partners are best positioned to help us here. With everything we build, be it our technical infrastructure and our team, we are always designing with an eye towards scaling. That’ll be important for cap table management as well.
As a co-founder of Pathways, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs passionate about addressing environmental challenges through technology and innovation?
Find the right co-founder. With my cofounder Leise, we feel like 1+1 = 20. We refine each other’s thinking, and serve as sounding boards for solving our thorniest problems, even as our team and focus have become more dispersed.
We need as many good people as we can get building tools to address the climate crisis. But entrepreneurship is hard – the right cofounder will turn your skill gaps into strengths. For example: Leise is a big believer of a culture of constant feedback. Initially I was pretty resistant, having seen the cost of poorly given feedback in other orgs. However, I’ve become a huge champion of consistent feedback.
Consistently making time to give feedback removes much of the stigma and anxiety created by practice, but it also allows us to quickly identify and address issues before the fester.Importantly, that feedback is both positive and constructive, and so the process is also a great way to give each other and our teams a lot of love and validation. That all creates an environment where people are consistently reminded of what they are capable of and any problems are quickly addressed.
Can you share any upcoming developments or initiatives Pathways is working on enhancing its platform and impact further?
We’re working on making Pathways even faster to deploy – and more powerful once it’s implemented. Our goal is to allow a customer to have a live LCA model and published EPD within a week of signing up at Pathways, and we’re well on our way there. But it’s about more than automating LCAs – we’re building off of this data to enable smart recommendations to decarbonize the manufacturing process, and think it’s very reasonable for manufacturers to reduce the Global Warming Potential of their products by 20+% within a year of using Pathways, just by incorporating LCA data into their supply chain and operations decisions.
