Carbonfact, a Carbon Management Software built for the fashion industry, announced it has raised €13.9 million Series A led by European VC Alven, who already led Carbonfact’s seed round in mid-2022, and joined by global VC firm Headline who is also joining the board. The round also sees a follow-on investment from Y Combinator, whose 2021 batch the company was part of.
Carbonfact’s priorities over the next twelve months will focus on helping textile retailers and manufacturers measure and build plans to reduce their emissions in line with upcoming regulations and expanding global onboarding teams. The company has recently launched a new suite of modeling tools that enable fashion brands to understand how changes in product design or supplier selection can affect carbon footprints before products are made. This allows them to focus on reducing emissions instead of offsetting them.
The fashion industry is responsible for up to 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Founded in 2021 with the mission to decarbonize fashion, Carbonfact’s automated carbon management software tackles this issue with tools to help fashion companies measure, reduce, and disclose their products’ emissions in line with upcoming regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
The company founders are Marc Laurent, who previously founded Kerala Ventures (one of the best performing French pre-seed funds having invested in Doctolib & Malt), Martin Daniel (formerly Data Science Lead at Airbnb), and Romain Champoulier (formerly CTO of JobTeaser).
“After meeting with hundreds of textile brands and suppliers, we realised that collecting data and reporting on all product and supply-chain information is a complex task that requires more comprehensive data management than spreadsheets allow. We believe that fashion brands should be able to measure and report on climate progress with limited manual work,” said Marc Laurent, the company’s CEO.
Measuring carbon emissions in the fashion industry is a complex task. The regulatory landscape has become difficult to navigate due to constantly evolving standards, such as the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), which require expert knowledge. To calculate the environmental impact of a single garment, more than 100 data points are required, including weight, origin, and energy usage during manufacturing. Fashion companies face a significant challenge in tracking emissions due to the intricate, multi-layered nature of their supply chains. Manually gathering and consolidating data across the outsourced manufacturing and own business is not only error-prone but also unsustainable as new laws increase reporting requirements.
Carbonfact stands out by automating this time and resource-intensive task, addressing the industry’s challenge of collecting accurate and primary data from multiple supply chain tiers. The software connects to the company’s IT systems and cleans and analyzes the data to then identify gaps and anomalies. Carbonfact employs machine learning to systematically fill in any missing details and provide reliable footprint calculations, even when data is incomplete. On the live platform, brands can identify emission-intensive manufacturing processes, build reduction plans and export automatically created reports for annual carbon disclosure, aligning with multiple frameworks, and ensuring compliance with new laws and standards.
Bartosz Jakubowski, Partner at Alven, commented: “We strongly believe the future is about vertical and product-centric Carbon Management Platforms, and we were impressed by the leadership position that Carbonfact has been able to take on the fashion industry”.
Jonathan Userovici, General Partner at Headline, added: “The fashion industry is worth $1,900B globally. It also emits some of the highest amounts of emissions for each dollar spent. Carbonfact is the only platform that offers a product deep enough to satisfy today’s increasingly complex supply chains. Carbonfact’s customers were the first ones to tell us about the incredible value the platform provides. Some of them were even able to access more attractive lending rates and sustainability incentives by being able to show real sustainability efforts.”
