Greenly, a French firm has secured $23 million in a Series A investment. The firm has developed a software-as-a-service platform that allows you to calculate your organization’s carbon emissions, store and manage them in one place, create a certified carbon footprint report, and gain insight into strategies to minimize emissions. Today’s investment round is led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and XAnge. Several business angels, including Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, are also taking part in the round.
Sweep, Persefoni, and Watershed are among Greenly’s rivals in the carbon management space. Greenly, on the other hand, concentrates on small and medium businesses. And huge consulting firms continue to dominate the market. With interfaces with hundreds of data sources, the firm strives to automate as many stages as possible. Greenly then takes it a step further by providing guidelines on how to optimize your reporting process and obtain more granular data. It may then prepare a carbon report in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol.
Greenly users must first integrate the service with their accounting and financial data. Codat is being used by the firm to integrate with a variety of financial services. Greenly compute an estimate of carbon emissions for low-priority goods automatically. Some software businesses, for example, provide a dollar-to-carbon ratio in their carbon footprint reports. Greenly assess the environmental effect of an $850 Salesforce purchase.
For larger sources of emissions, the platform might prompt you with questions to determine exactly what you purchased. Hundreds of thousands of data points were acquired greenly from a public database. It tries to learn over time so that you don’t have to repeatedly answer the same questions. “We started with financial and accounting data, but we’re gradually expanding our data sources,” said Alexis Normand, co-founder and CEO.
Integrations with electrical providers, cloud services, and e-commerce platforms are being developed by the firm. Greenly, for example, may get your Shopify inventory or the amount of vCPUs in your cloud infrastructure automatically. But what happens upstream and downstream is the most challenging aspect of the carbon footprint calculation. How can you assess your suppliers’ carbon footprint?
Greenly has used this obstacle to their advantage by creating a viral cycle. Customers can provide their suppliers with a link to a greenly site so that they can share additional information about their carbon emissions. “You must involve your suppliers if you want to move farther.” We invite our clients to submit a request for more detailed information. After that, after we have all of the information, we aggregate everything and grade suppliers,” Normand explained.
These providers might begin using the product for their own business once they have tried it. “We want to make Quickbooks for carbon footprints,” Normand explained. There are various legislative requirements that support the software sector. In France, for example, enterprises with more than 500 employees are required to publish a carbon report. The restriction will be reduced to 250 employees in a few years.
SMBs account for 90% of the startup’s clients, while some larger businesses use the site to compare vendors. Once you’ve added all of your suppliers to the platform, you may prioritize one over the other based on environmental factors. Greenly is presently used by 400 businesses. While the majority of them are situated in France, the firm has created an office in the United States to cater to the American market.
