Greenly aims to help SMEs track and reduce their carbon emissions, raises $22M

A growing coalition of countries, businesses and institutions have been setting bold carbon and greenhouse gas emissions targets, pledging to get to net-zero by 2050. However, tracking emissions has been notoriously difficult as reporting criteria remains without standards and largely voluntary.

According to a recent Google Cloud study, while environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives were a top priority for 64% of executives surveyed, 58% say their organization is guilty of greenwashing, or conveying a false impression that their company’s products or practices are more environmentally friendly than they actually are.

Despite many leaders claiming they want to advance their organization’s sustainability efforts, there’s also a gap between how well they think they’re doing on the decarbonization front, and how accurately they’re able to measure their performance.

The business of tracking carbon emissions

As a critical turning point in the climate crisis approaches, it’s no wonder there’s a booming market for companies like Greenly that are helping small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) calculate, reduce and offset their emissions. Recently selected among the FrenchTech Green 20, Greenly says its main objective is to give businesses control over their carbon data and create tailor-made action plans that enable them to reach their climate goals quickly and easily.

Founded in 2019 by Alexis Normand, Matthieu Vegreville and Arnaud Delubac, Greenly is also entering a new phase of scaling, having just closed a $22 million series A funding round co-led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and German and France-based investment fund Xange.

With more than 400 corporate customers, France-based Greenly has recently opened offices in the U.S. to deploy its software-as-a-service (SaaS) carbon management software to American SMEs. Unlike other climate management tools like Persefoni, Watershed and Sweep, Greenly claims to exclusively target SMEs since they represent 80% of global emissions.

Automating carbon accounting

At the heart of the company’s vision, Greenly claims that carbon accounting will one day become ubiquitous, at the same level as financial accounting, for example.

Greenly’s technology is designed to automate the analysis of data collection by integrating with the accounting or billing data of more than 100 different software solutions. These integrations make it possible to calculate the three emission scopes in real time. And thanks to an extensive library of more than 100,000 emission factors, the Greenly software is designed to convert these activities into emissions measurements and generate a carbon report in accordance with international standards like the GHG (greenhouse gas) Protocol.