Carbon Maps, an environmental accounting startup for the food industry, gets new backers | TechCrunch
Carbon Maps is a relatively new entrant in the carbon and environmental accounting space as it is less than one year old. But the French company has already secured $7.6 million in funding (€7 million) following the startup’s €3 million seed round extension.
I already covered Carbon Maps back in February, so I encourage you to read this previous article to get the full story. But I wanted to share an update as the company managed to convince Daphni to participate in the seed round. Carbon Maps had already raised €4 million ($4.3 million at today’s exchange rate) from Breega and Samaipata.
As a reminder, Carbon Maps is building a software-as-a-service platform focused on the environmental impact of the food industry. Unlike other carbon accounting startups, Carbon Maps focuses on one industry in particular and helps companies calculate their environmental footprint at the product-level.
“The first step in improving our impact on the environment is to measure and track it accurately. We are convinced that only a pure player like Carbon Maps has the capacity to do this at a sufficiently granular level to enable monitoring and improvement over time,” Daphni partner Stanislas Lot said in a statement.
For instance, a company selling chicken breasts could make a life cycle assessment of these chicken breasts using Carbon Maps by taking into account a wide range of criteria, such as the energy required, supplies (grains), packaging, transportation, waste, etc.
Carbon Maps follows the latest recommendations from standardized sources like GHG Protocol, IPCC, ISO 14040 and 14044. It takes into accounts carbon emissions under the scopes 1, 2 and 3, meaning that you can integrate indirect carbon emissions from suppliers and clients.
From there, clients can use the platform to get an eco-score and define objectives to reduce the environmental impact over time. It’s also a good way to compare several suppliers and optimize the supply chain based on each supplier’s carbon impact.
“We don’t want to create the ratings. We want to create the tools that help with calculations — a sort of SAP,” Carbon Maps co-founder and CEO Patrick Asdaghi told me a few months ago.
Carbon Maps has already convinced a dozen clients to use its tool already, including Andros, Sodexo, Potel&Chabot, the Bel milk producers’s association and Foodles.
We’ll likely hear more from Carbon Maps in the coming months as French regulation is changing with a formal implementation of the eco-score rating system right around the corner. Food brands will be able to calculate and add a letter rating from A to E on their packaging, which could create a virtuous circle — just like you can see the nutri-score everywhere in French supermarkets.
