Gothenburg-based foodtech startup CarbonCloud has collected €7.5 million in a Series A round led by Cusp Capital and Peak. The round also saw participation from Rivus Ventures and current investors Maki VC and TS Ventures. The startup’s SaaS solution enables detailed calculations of climate footprints of food products and production processes. The funding will allow CarbonCloud to enhance its offerings and establish itself as the leading climate intelligence platform in the food industry. The startup is targeting to grow its customer base and strengthen its competitive advantages.
Founded in 2019 by climate researchers and software entrepreneurs, CarbonCloud is a climate intelligence platform with a full focus on the specifics of the food industry, enabling its decision makers to trace the climate impact of their food and beverage products at every stage of the supply chain. The platform has automated the manual life cycle assessment and empowers various stakeholders throughout every organization in the food industry to target, track and improve climate performance. With sustainability pioneers like Dole Sunshine Company and Oatly onboard, CarbonCloud aims to make the unified measurement framework available to every player in the supply system and lead the transformation of the industry.
“Google has built the search graph, Facebook built the social graph, and CarbonCloud has built the food graph” says David Bryngelsson, Ph.D., CEO and founder of CarbonCloud. “We have witnessed the food industry waste valuable resources searching for supply chain emissions data but this network problem can only be solved digitally. The latest investment provides us with strong tailwind when rolling out this much-needed digital solution to the global food industry.”
The potential for food companies is tremendous: Consumer demand for sustainable options is continually growing as 87% of European consumers are willing to pay for more sustainable options [1]. As a consequence, commitment from the food industry for strategic and systematic emissions reductions has skyrocketed over the last years. However, decision makers are still struggling to trace the trail of emissions throughout the complex food supply chains. CarbonCloud automatically maps out a digital twin of the food supply chain for each individual product in a portfolio from agriculture all the way up to retail, enabling decision-makers to confidently respond to consumer demand.
“One of the core beliefs behind our investment was that industry-specific solutions will ultimately become the winning climate intelligence platform vs. industry-agnostic approaches,” says Jan Sessenhausen, General Partner at Cusp Capital. “We consider CarbonCloud’s data and calculation model to be superior to its competitors and are really happy with the overall development since our initial investment in 2021.”
“Unprecedented pressure from policymakers and consumers sends the food industry into a frenzied search for a solution,” says Stefan Bary, Managing Partner at Peak. “CarbonCloud provides this with unrivalled consistency and detail: It takes mere seconds to establish the climate footprint of a food product while everyone else needs months to get a fraction of the results. The platform delivers value quicker and on a more granular level than any competitor.”
