Climate risk is becoming a core boardroom discussion in real estate sector: Accacia's Annu Talreja

Accacia helps asset managers, developers, owners and operators track and report their emissions, and its AI recommends projects to invest in for decarbonisation

By Harichandan Arakali Forbes India Staff

Published: Jul 25, 2024 01:55:18 PM IST

Updated: Jul 25, 2024 02:01:35 PM IST

Full Bio

Annu Talreja, Founder, Aspeen Venture (Accacia) Image: Amit Verma

Annu Talreja is a second-time founder with her company Aspeen Venture, better known as Accacia for its eponymous carbon tracking and decarbonisation recommendation engine, primarily for the real estate and infrastructure sector. Talreja is an architect and urban planner, whose experience spans design, construction, investments, asset management, and operations.

Globally, the top-tier of the industry is undergoing a “mindset shift”, Talreja says, with the realisation that the impact of climate change on real estate is here and now, and that it’s no longer simply an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting requirement.

Before turning entrepreneur with her first venture Oxforcaps, a Singapore-based student housing startup, Talreja worked for some 15 years in real estate with companies such as hospitality chain Marriot International and AECOM, a multinational engineering company that provides design, consulting, construction, and management services to a wide range of industries.

“Climate risk is becoming a core boardroom conversation, and the regulatory environment too is changing around the world,” says Talreja, who’s also the CEO of Accacia.

She started the company in 2022 with two co-founders Piyush Chitkara, CTO, and Jagmohan Gaarg, who leads sales and business development.

While industry estimates vary, the real estate and building sector is widely accepted to be responsible for 30-40 percent of global energy consumption and about 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is also what prompted Talreja, with her first-hand experience in the sector, to take a “very verticalised approach versus other carbon accounting and decarbonisation platforms”, she says.

“A month ago, we also launched a marketplace,” she says, which connects vendors of more sustainably produced products and equipment in the sector with buyers.

Accacia’s product, which Talreja sees evolving into a platform, helps asset managers, developers, owners, operators help track their emissions and report them–and many of these customers are multi-billion-dollar enterprises. And then the startup has an artificial intelligence (AI) engine that helps customers understand the projects that they should invest in for decarbonisation.

A notable feather in Accacia’s cap is that it’s among the very few in Asia to achieve accreditation from GRESB, Talreja says. GRESB stands for Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. It is an industry-driven organisation that assesses and benchmarks the ESG performance of real assets globally, including real estate portfolios and infrastructure assets.

Among Accacia’s top customers is US-based Hines, one of world’s top 10 real estate owners, Talreja says. Other well-known businesses using the startup’s products include Nucleus Office Parks, the India operator of the real estate owned by Blackstone, the world’s biggest money manager, and Tata Realty and Infrastructure Limited.

Also read: India needs energy-efficient buildings, today

“Our product is catering to the top 20-25 percent of the industry,” she says, and therefore that is the segment Accacia is targeting in most geographies. Currently, about 70 percent of the company’s revenues are from Southeast Asia and the rest are from India. Accacia is also selling in the Middle East and the US.

The product supports tracking of what’s called “embodied carbon” at each stage of a real estate “value chain” from land buyers to builders and operators to corporate tenants to financial investors, she says.

In April, Accacia announced it had raised $6.5 million in a pre-series A funding round, led by Illuminate Financial, with participation from AC Ventures, Accel, and B Capital.

“Bridging the green financing gap has remained one of the top priorities” worldwide, Ting Yan, an enterprise SaaS investor at Illuminate Financial, wrote in a post in April, discussing the investment in Accacia.

“We believe that Accacia will become the vertical knowledge bridge between green financiers and the building operators to facilitate the mass adoption of climate technologies through green financing” Yan writes.

Talreja also believes that going deeper with the intellectual property that she and her co-founders are developing is the way forward. For example, there is increasing interest in what are called “green leases”, and the startup is developing a module for that. In this way, there’s scope to build a fairly large business, she says.