Cities and counties across Europe are under legal and political pressure to hit emissions targets, but most of them still rely on spreadsheets, PDF reports, and manual workflows to plan and track progress. Ark Climate, a Munich-based ClimateTech startup founded in 2024, is building the software infrastructure to fix that. The startup has raised €2.1M in pre-seed funding to scale its platform for local government climate planning in Germany and beyond.
Most municipalities don’t lack ambition on climate, they lack tools. Creating a greenhouse gas inventory from scratch, mapping reduction scenarios, and then tracking dozens of individual actions across departments is genuinely complex work, and general-purpose software like Excel or project management tools don’t fit the job well. Climate action managers end up doing a lot of manual work, and progress reporting to citizens or elected officials is inconsistent at best.
How The Platform Works:
Ark Climate addresses this directly with a platform built specifically for how municipalities actually operate. The software covers three core workflows: greenhouse gas accounting using recognized standards including the GHG Protocol and GPC; scenario and potential modeling to help municipalities map out different reduction pathways; and action monitoring through a customizable digital catalog of climate measures that tracks progress using defined success indicators.
On the implementation side, the platform includes task and project management features for coordinating work across departments, along with a public dashboard so cities can communicate progress transparently to residents. Today, 43 German municipalities are already using the platform, including the City of Überlingen, the District of Calw, and the Municipality of Eching. Their feedback points to one consistent theme: the platform fits the way government teams actually work, not the other way around. Sandra Hinke, Climate Action Manager at the District of Calw, specifically highlighted this balance as what convinced her team to choose Ark Climate.
Built for Public Sector Trust:
For any public sector buyer, data security and regulatory compliance carry equal weight to functionality. Ark Climate hosts all data on an ISO 27001-certified data center operated by EU OVH Cloud in Frankfurt am Main, the platform is fully GDPR compliant, and the development team operates entirely from Munich within Germany’s legal and regulatory framework. For municipalities cautious about where their data goes, these details are often the deciding factor in a procurement decision.
Who’s Behind This:
Ruth Bosse, CEO and Founder, leads the 16-person team out of Munich. The team combines expertise in municipal climate policy and software development, which shows up clearly in how the product handles real government workflows rather than generic project management use cases.
The Funding:
The €2.1M pre-seed round was led by Satgana, a climate-focused venture capital firm, with participation from another.VC, the Voyagers Climate Fund, angel investors, and notably the Federal Ministry of Research. The backing from a federal ministry is particularly significant for a public sector-focused startup, lending institutional credibility that carries weight in government procurement conversations.
The Market Opportunity:
Germany alone has over 11,000 municipalities. Federal and state-level climate legislation is pushing local governments to formalize their climate action planning, creating a growing and structured addressable market for purpose-built tools. The EU’s broader climate commitments add further urgency across member states, and Ark Climate’s focus on municipal climate action software puts it in a segment with real regulatory tailwinds and limited direct competition.
Expansion On The Horizon:
With €2.1M in pre-seed funding secured and 43 municipalities already on the platform, Ark Climate is positioned to grow its customer base across Germany and invest further in its platform capabilities. ISO 27001 data hosting, validated adoption from real government users, and strong institutional backing give the company a credible foundation in the public sector ClimateTech space. For anyone tracking municipal climate action software or European ClimateTech startups, Ark Climate is building exactly where the demand is heading.
