German startup Root raises €8M to build the climate OS of the food industry

Berlin-based Root, a startup developing an operating system to help food & beverage companies manage their climate footprint, announced on Monday that it has secured €8M in a seed funding round.

The funding round was led by Christoph Janz at Point Nine, with participation from Project A, HelloWorld, Arc Investors, and a host of experienced startup operators.

The German company plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth and increase the team’s headcount.

Root: Building climate OS of the food industry

Eric Oancea and Maurice Hensl founded Root Global to help companies across the food system get to net zero.

The company does this by developing Root OS, a platform that helps companies across the food system manage their climate footprint and reduce GHG emissions.

“In the past 18 months, we have been obsessed with deeply understanding our customers and solving their most urgent pain point,” says the founding duo,

Since launching its RootOS platform in October 2023, the company claims to have onboarded some of Europe’s largest Food & Beverage players, including the largest dairy plant in Europe and the world’s largest fast-food chain.

Through them, the German company works with over 10,000 farmers to help them manage and reduce millions of tons of CO2e.

“What makes us particularly proud is that the majority of our customers discovered and started working with us thanks to strong word of mouth and industry references,” says Eric Oancea and Maurice Hensl, co-founders of Root.

Root’s strategy involves addressing one food product category at a time, helping companies measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by focusing on the largest sources often found deep in their supply chain.

For example, out of Nestlé’s 113M tons of CO2e, which approximately equals all of Belgium’s GHG emissions, over 107M are emitted across their supply chain.

“Our mission is more urgent today than ever. Climate performance has become a critical business performance indicator as enterprises are now mandated to disclose their climate performance and set Net Zero targets. Some of the companies we now work with had even lost key customers due to missing climate requirements and documentation, before onboarding,” says Eric Oancea and Maurice Hensl, co-founders of Root.

“So far, we have been able to help companies assess their carbon footprint at unprecedented levels of accuracy, efficiency, and scale. We have now gradually developed to further support companies derive and initiating tangible reduction measures. We aim to demonstrate emission reduction year over year. Given we have access to the most critical data in the supply chain, we believe we have a clear and practical solution that will become industry standard for a €400bn market,” adds the founding duo.