French startup Greenly raises €2.53M to help companies reduce their carbon footprint; here’s how

Paris-based Greenly, a tech startup specialised in helping organisations lower their carbon emissions, announced that it has raised $3M (approx €2.53M) in a fresh round of funding.

The round follows Greenly’s initial funding of $600K it raised in 2020 for its mobile application that automatically tracks individual carbon footprint with banking transactions – an app which was deployed in banks such as BNP Paribas, Tink, or Pixipay.

Support from investors 

The current round saw participation from a set of prestigious tech investors including Alexandre Prot, CEO and co-founder of Qonto; Bertrand Jelensperger, founder of TheFork; and Thibault Lanthier, CEO of MonDocteur sold to Doctolib. 

In addition, the investment was also supported by VC fund “French Partners”, led by Emilie Loyer Buttiaux, and the BPI, the French Tech Investment arm.

Capital utilisation

The proceeds from this round will help the company to accelerate the deployment of its B2B SaaS software and further develop its technology to help SMEs launch their climate strategy more simply.

The funds will also be used to expand the technical and R&D teams, hire more carbon footprint experts, and build a sales team for scaling beyond France – in Europe and the US. Greenly’s goal is to go from a few hundred customers to thousands.

Measure your personal carbon footprint on a daily basis

The US Green Deal and the new “EU taxonomy for sustainable activities” are putting pressure on businesses to manage their carbon emissions. The obligation to set GHG emissions targets is now trickling down from large corporations to their suppliers.

Alexis Normand, CEO and co-founder, says, “Greenly’s vision is that all companies should play a role in fighting global warming. You cannot improve something you don’t measure. But you also need simple tools that any SME can use to make this measure and reduction within reach. We had to invent software that merges financial and carbon accounting. We are proud to contribute to this revolution.”

Greenly’s mission is simple: to accelerate the development of the technology to enable each player – whether companies, banks, or private individuals – to better monitor and control their CO2 emissions.

The company’s platform automates carbon accounting in full compliance with international reporting standards (CDP, GHG, and TCFD). The platform wants to target  SMEs rather than large enterprises as a way to disrupt the industry. It is already used by more than a hundred scale-ups and unicorns in France, including Payfit, Swile, Konbini, Foodles, LeoCare, Foodchéri, Outsight, Alma etc.

Greenly was founded in 2019 by Alexis Normand, ex-head of B2B at Withings and Nokia Digital Health, HEC, Sciences-Po, Techstars Alumni; Matthieu Vegreville, CTO, X-Telecom, former data scientist at Withings & Embleema; and, Arnaud Delubac, UX/UI, ESSEC-Centrale, INSEEC, formerly part of the French Prime Minister’s digital communication team.

One of Greenly’s key added values is to automate carbon analytics, using data accessible through APIs, namely accounting data or billing information from large GHG emission contributors. The company has developed an AI-powered analytics & recommendation engine to suggest practical ways to reduce one’s emissions, for example suggesting less carbon-intensive alternatives to suppliers.

AI-powered SaaS to help companies reduce carbon footprint

For a tech company, digital services typically represent 50 per cent of its emissions, for instance, because of electricity consumed by data centers running on carbon-intensive energy sources. This is typically the case for Amazon Web Service. 

Using costing APIs from such services, Greenly is able to automate tracking of carbon emissions and recommend mitigation measures automatically, for instance by suggesting hosting data in a less carbon-intensive State or minimising the usage of machines that consume far too much energy.

Greenly thus offers its customers the possibility of setting Science-based target by activity type in order to align the company’s footprint with the path set by the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Besides, the company’s software also trains users on the fundamentals of climate change and corporate climate strategy, even gamifying carbon reduction initiatives through in-app challenges.