France-based Carbonfact bags €13.9M to decarbonise the fashion industry; here’s how | Silicon Canals

Paris-based Carbonfact, a carbon management software built for the fashion industry, announced that it has secured $15M (approximately €13.98M) in a Series A round of funding.

Carbonfact’s investment was led by existing investor Alven, with Headline coming on board as a fresh investor and securing a seat on the board. Y Combinator, an existing investor, also participated in this round.

Jonathan Userovici, General Partner at Headline, says, “The fashion industry is worth $1900B 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.”

Decarbonising fashion industry

According to the EU Parliament, the fashion industry pumps out as much as 10 per cent of the world’s yearly carbon emissions, surpassing the combined emissions from international flights and maritime shipping.

Carbonfact, founded in 2021, aims to reduce the fashion industry’s carbon footprint. Its software helps fashion companies measure, cut, and report emissions, meeting upcoming regulations like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The company’s founders include Marc Laurent, who previously founded Kerala Ventures, a French pre-seed fund investing in companies like Doctolib & Malt. Martin Daniel, previously Data Science Lead at Airbnb, and Romain Champoulier, formerly CTO of JobTeaser, are also part of the team.

Co-founder and CEO Laurent says, “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.”

Helping brands understand where their carbon emissions come from

Measuring carbon emissions in fashion is tough, says Carbonfact. Regulations like the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) keep changing, needing expert understanding. 

Over 100 data points like weight, origin, and manufacturing energy use are needed to gauge one garment’s impact. Fashion firms struggle with complex supply chains, making emission tracking a big challenge. Manual data collection is prone to errors and unsustainable with rising reporting demands.

Carbonfact streamlines the resource-intensive task of gathering accurate data across fashion supply chains. Its software automates the process, connecting with company IT systems to clean, analyse, and fill in missing details using machine learning. 

Brands can then identify emission hotspots, devise reduction plans, and generate reports for carbon disclosure, meeting various standards and regulatory requirements.

Carbonfact enables over 150 brands and suppliers to measure, report, and reduce their emissions, without manual intervention.

Capital utilisation

Over the next year, Carbonfact will focus on helping textile retailers and manufacturers measure and plan emission reduction strategies to comply with upcoming regulations. The company also plans to expand its global onboarding teams. 

Recently, the company introduced a suite of modeling tools enabling fashion brands to assess how alterations in product design or supplier selection impact carbon footprints pre-production. This empowers brands to prioritise emission reduction over offsetting.

Brief about the investors

Alven is an early-stage venture capital firm known for identifying and supporting “high-potential, category-defining” companies. With over $2B under management, the firm operates out of Paris and London, backing more than 170 teams across Europe and the US over the last two decades. 

The VC firm’s portfolio includes Stripe, Algolia, Dataiku, Qonto, Ankorstore, Datadog (Sqreen), Trainline (CaptainTrain), OpenClassrooms, Jobteaser, and Sézane, among others.

Headline is a venture capital firm that collaborates with expanding technology teams worldwide to propel their success on a global scale. 

Through its Early Stage Funds in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as well as its Growth Funds investing globally from Series B onwards, the firm covers a wide spectrum of investment stages and geographies. This reach enables Headline to observe local trends, engage with promising founders, and lead rounds across various stages. 

Headline boasts a global portfolio of over 300 investments, featuring companies like Raisin, Mistral AI, Sonos, AppFolio, Bumble, Fetch, Segment, and Yeahka.