Rhizome, the ambitious climate-tech startup founded by Mishal Thadani, has successfully raised $6.5 million in Seed funding to build the next generation of tools that empower governments, organizations, and communities to accelerate climate action through policy innovation.

The round was backed by a robust lineup of forward-thinking investors including Base10 Partners, MCJ Collective, CLAI Ventures, Convective Capital, El Cap, Streetlife Ventures, Stepchange, and Everywhere.

Rhizome is betting big on one key idea: while climate science and technology have leapt forward, policy infrastructure remains dangerously outdated. Their platform intends to bridge this gap.

---

Solving the Climate Policy Bottleneck

The climate crisis isn’t just a technological challenge - it’s a policy execution problem. Governments often struggle to translate broad environmental goals into local, data-driven policies with measurable outcomes. Rhizome aims to change this by providing a digital platform for tracking, analyzing, and implementing climate policies with surgical precision.

The company combines real-time environmental data, municipal targets, funding frameworks, and stakeholder alignment into a single decision-support interface. That makes it easier for cities, states, and climate-focused organizations to design and deploy policy faster - without starting from scratch every time.

Rhizome doesn't just digitize bureaucracy - it replaces complexity with clarity, offering a command center for localized decarbonization.

---

A Systematic Shift in Climate Tech

What sets Rhizome apart is its focus on infrastructure that sits beneath the entire climate stack. Instead of competing with EV makers, carbon removal startups, or ESG reporting tools, Rhizome operates as connective tissue - linking intent, policy, and action.

Their platform is designed to map out the regulatory and financial levers that move climate outcomes - from energy mandates to procurement policy - and model the downstream effects of policy changes. In doing so, they transform policy from a static document into a living system that learns and adapts over time.

---

A Tactic That Builds Long-Term Moats

Here’s something smart founders will recognize instantly: Rhizome isn’t trying to win by moving faster than incumbents - it’s winning by moving deeper. Their model creates a long-term data advantage by embedding into government workflows, logging decisions, incentives, and results across multiple climate policy cycles.

What does that mean in practice?

The more cities that use Rhizome, the more robust their internal policy engine becomes. Over time, the company becomes the go-to repository of which climate levers work best under which conditions. That network intelligence cannot easily be replicated.

If you’re building for regulated, public, or bureaucratic sectors - this is the blueprint. Embed early, capture process data, and learn faster than the system itself evolves.

And here’s the insight few early-stage founders truly internalize: distribution power compounds when your product is a “first draft” of a complex decision. If you become the thing governments or enterprises open to start thinking, you’ve already won. Don’t just sell solutions - sell scaffolding for their thinking. That’s what Rhizome is doing brilliantly.

---

The Market Opportunity: Climate Policy Infrastructure

Rhizome is emerging at a time of unprecedented climate funding at the local, national, and global levels.

In the United States alone, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has unlocked $369 billion in federal funding dedicated to energy security and climate change mitigation. Of that, a significant portion - estimated at $60 to $80 billion - will rely on local and state implementation.

Yet, according to a 2023 McKinsey report, over 70% of U.S. municipalities lack the policy design staff or digital infrastructure to manage such funding effectively. This is where startups like Rhizome play a transformative role: by operationalizing policy and making it accessible.

Globally, more than 2,500 cities have joined climate pledge networks such as the Global Covenant of Mayors, yet many lack standardized frameworks for turning pledges into measurable, funded policy.

The climate tech market itself is projected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027, per PwC analysis, with a strong uptick in solutions that support decarbonization through software and planning - not just hardware innovation.

---

A Founder Rooted in Impact

Founder Mishal Thadani isn’t new to the climate world. He previously worked in public policy and environmental consultancy, giving him firsthand exposure to the structural inefficiencies that hold back even the most well-funded sustainability efforts.

His insight was simple but powerful: “If cities can’t even see what policies are in place, how do we expect them to implement the ones we need?”

Rhizome was born from that frustration - and it’s already being piloted in several cities and state-level environmental departments across the U.S.

---

Investor Signal: Climate Infrastructure, Not Just Climate Tech

The composition of Rhizome’s investor roster reveals something about the direction of climate investing. Firms like Base10 Partners and MCJ aren’t just looking for cleantech; they’re looking for leverage layers - software that enables institutions to accelerate decarbonization across sectors, not just within one.

Meanwhile, climate-native funds like Convective Capital and El Cap recognize the long game: policy wins are sticky, often measured in decades, not quarters. Rhizome positions itself to win those long contracts by becoming indispensable to the planning layer of public climate action.

---

What’s Next for Rhizome

With $6.5M in new capital, Rhizome will:

• Expand its team of policy analysts, engineers, and municipal advisors
  
• Launch pilots in over a dozen new cities by early next year
  
• Integrate IRA, CHIPS Act, and Build Back Better funding pipelines into its decision engine
  
• Build partnerships with nonprofits, climate policy coalitions, and federal agencies
  

Their long-term ambition? To make Rhizome the digital policy backbone for every climate-forward city in the world.