Coatue Management, a large technology investor overseeing $16 billion in assets, led the new funding round, joined by Bessemer, Canaan and others. In the end, the only tool with a true automation component, the potential investor found and employees contra asset account confirmed, was an internal workflow engine, or “a guided to-do list” for ScaleFactor employees that organized tasks required to close a customer’s books. This addresses a company’s ability to configure the software to fit its specific use case and workflow.

The association mechanisms between the pollution retention benefit and cooling benefit

To construct a concise and highly generalizable model, we selected lambda.1se criterion as the optimal λ value for the final model65. The above analyses were performed using the graph learning-matching network (GLMNet) package in R66. Initially, Category I was defined as offering no benefits, while Categories II, III, and IV were considered to provide benefits. Subsequently, Categories I and II were classified as offering low benefits, whereas Categories III and IV were classified as providing high benefits. Consequently, the number of plant communities with no pollution retention but with cooling benefits (A1), no cooling but scalefactor pollution retention benefits (A2), and both pollution retention and cooling benefits (A3) were 5 (6.49%), 2 (2.60%), and 70 (90.91%), respectively. Regarding the combinations of low pollution retention and high cooling efficiency (B1), high pollution retention and low cooling efficiency (B2), and high pollution retention and high cooling efficiency (B3), there were 22 (28.57%), 12 (15.58%), and 42 (54.55%) plant communities, respectively.

• With the variation in the three-dimensional structural characterization factors, the rate of change in the pollution retention benefit factors was 3-5.5 times greater than that in the cooling benefit factors.
• And L.C.; investigation, K.D.; writing—original draft preparation, X.M., and C.J.; writing—review and editing, M.Y.; visualization, X.M., C.J.
• The results of microscopic monitoring of pollutant concentration and atmospheric temperature can be compared with findings from remote sensing inversion, meteorological station monitoring, and model simulations (e.g., CFD models).
• After identifying the key three-dimensional structural characterization factors, we employed a range of functional models for regression analyses to evaluate the influence of three-dimensional structural characterization factors on pollution retention benefit or cooling benefit factors.
• When mediated by R-Tmean and R-Tmax, RTDGB-T consistently manifested the highest proportion of direct effect contributions (79.57% and 86.89%, respectively) and minor indirect effect contributions (20.44% and 13.14%, respectively), with all the effect values being negative.
• Austin-based ScaleFactor provides their small business accounting automation platform designed to combine software and expert assistance to SMBs and remove concern for financial, tax and accounting challenges.
• In other words, interventions focused on extreme temperatures can minimize the trade-off between pollution retention and cooling benefits.

ScaleFactor Raised $100 Million In A Year As VCs Chase Small Business Focused Fintechs

Notably, R-PM10min, R-Tmean, and R-Tmin had predominantly positive values, implying that the minimum PM10 concentration, average temperature, and minimum temperature were generally lower within greenspaces than outside. Based on the evaluation of the positive and negative values of the pollution retention benefit factors, we categorized the 77 plant communities into four distinct categories. Regarding the pollution retention benefit, the distributions of communities in Categories I, II, III, and IV were 5 (6.49%), 18 (23.38%), 27 (35.06%), and 27 (35.06%), respectively. For cooling benefit, the distributions of communities in Categories I, II, III, and IV were 2 (2.60%), 10 (12.99%), 22 (28.57%), and 43 (55.84%), respectively (Fig. 5a).

Impact of urban greenspaces on pollution retention and cooling benefits

• Specifically, the impacts of RTDGB-H, RTDGB-HT, and RTDGB-T could explain 17.1%, 19.6%, and 18.3%, respectively, of the variation in R-PM10mean.
• Taking Beijing as an example, from 1960 to 2014, the annual average temperature in the city increased by 0.42 °C per decade6.
• Six years later ScaleFactor has more than 1,000 customers and big names in tech investing as backers.
• We gathered plant community characterization data, air pollutant data, and meteorological data in the field, performing preprocessing tasks such as outlier removal to obtain three-dimensional structural characterization factors and ecological benefit factors.
• In practical scenarios, managers of greenspaces may consider implementing measures such as sprinkler irrigation during periods of extreme heat at noon.
• Users have found that the software allows CFOs to focus on financial goals rather than getting caught up in daily data entries.

In these roles, Rathmann saw firsthand a glaring need for technology to help small businesses with their bookkeeping services. Though the pandemic may have been a death knell, ScaleFactor was on rocky ground long before, Forbes found. Technology startups are often rewarded for a “fake it ‘til you make it” mentality by venture capital firms willing to throw money at a product until it meets expectations. But ScaleFactor used aggressive sales tactics and prioritized chasing capital instead of building software that ultimately fell far short of what it promised, according to interviews with 15 former employees and executives. At the end of the day, Kurt Rathmann explained to Forbes last month, customers were craving a person, rather than a computer to do their accounting. “We really thought we could automate the entire back office of a small business,” Rathmann said.

• The solid black dots indicate that the effect values of the paths are significant, and the values to the left of the dots are the regression coefficients, with the lower limit and the upper limit representing 95% confidence intervals of the effect.
• Figure 9 illustrates the proportions of the direct and indirect effects of the three key three-dimensional structural characterization factors on the pollution retention benefit.
• This approach can enhance thermal comfort while reducing interference with the provision of pollution retention benefit for plant communities.
• Therefore, elucidating the potential mechanisms of urban greenspaces providing pollution retention and cooling benefits from the three-dimensional structural characteristics of plant communities are crucial for exploring simultaneous management approaches for air quality and thermal conditions in urban greenspaces.
• Therefore, it is necessary to collect particulate matter concentrations of different particle sizes to analyze the pollution retention benefit of plant communities comprehensively.
• First, we collected data solely during the daytime from September to October, which preventing the exploration of differences between day and night as well as variations across different seasons.

PM10, particulate matter with a diameter of less than 10 micrometers, can penetrate the lower respiratory system50, and its association with adverse health outcomes has been well documented51,52. In recent years, PM10 has emerged as a major air pollutant in Beijing, often being recorded at the highest concentrations among various pollutants7,53,54. As part of the investment, Coatue gets a seat on the board, giving ScaleFactor access to a hedge fund that invested in Uber, Lending Club, Reddit, and Lyft in addition to Square and Tiendaify. “The proliferation of data is making platforms like ScaleFactor increasingly useful,” for small and medium-sized businesses that are looking for actionable insight in real-time, said Laffont. During https://www.bookstime.com/ due diligence, one of these potential investors learned that ScaleFactor had a customer service team who they were told functioned as “account managers.” Further inquiry revealed the employees were accountants. “So the software might look automated, but they actually had all these people on the backend,” the potential investor said.