As fashion’s quest to calculate and reduce its carbon and sustainability impact quickens, two industry-specific platforms are merging to provide a wider range of data tools in one place.

Environmental data solution Carbonfact has acquired product impact platform Vaayu, creating a combined solution with a roughly 300-strong customer base across the U.S., Europe and Asia—including Carhartt, Ganni, Vestiaire Collective and Veja. While terms for the deal were not disclosed, Carbonfact told Sourcing Journal that the newly merged company will have an annual recurring revenue of 8 million to 10 million euros (approximately $9.28 million to $11.6 million at current exchange rates).

According to Carbonfact’s CEO and co-founder Marc Laurent, the company’s acquisition of Vaayu is representative of a larger trend of consolidation among sustainability and carbon data platforms as they adapt to their corporate user base’s needs. Fashion’s sustainability teams and budgets have gotten smaller, and they want their software to do more for less expense. Citing examples including Diginex’s purchase of Plan A and Sami joining SGS, Laurent noted that by joining together, platforms can better support companies across their rapidly expanding reporting, reduction and regulatory needs.

“We are at a moment where the solutions in this space are looking to come together to become bigger and more robust, rather than the sector staying fragmented across many small platforms,” he said. “Bringing Vaayu and Carbonfact together is part of that consolidation logic.”

As it becomes part of Carbonfact, the Vaayu brand will be “retired.” The latter’s data is being incorporated into Carbonfact’s modeling, and its customers will transition onto Carbonfact. Laurent said they will have access to their existing footprint information and can “pick up their work where they left off.”

“We started Vaayu to give retail and fashion companies the granular, product-level climate data they need to actually decarbonize, not just report on it,” explained Vaayu’s founder and CEO Namrata Sandhu. “Carbonfact shares that conviction, and together we can deliver it at the scale this industry now requires.”

While there are some overlaps in the two platforms’ scopes, this acquisition pools their respective data and capabilities. “What we’re bringing across from Vaayu is the scientific work and expertise their team built over five years, including proprietary emission factors and a body of LCA studies,” said Laurent. “That joins our own dataset, and it makes the reference data every brand on the platform draws from richer.”

Before founding Vaayu in 2020, Sandhu was head of sustainability at Zalando. The Berlin-based company’s solutions include automated impact calculators at the product and organization levels. It also provided tools to determine the footprint of transportation, packaging, supply chain and circularity.

Launched the following year in Paris, Carbonfact pulls product and supply chain data from sources including product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and/or spreadsheets and addresses any gaps in information automatically using primary data from suppliers. This data is then used to calculate LCAs for each SKU. The platform’s carbon accounting software can be used to generate reports and support disclosures such as digital product passports (DPPs) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Companies can also use the data to plan and strategize their carbon reduction by modeling scenarios.

What both platforms share is a focus on the apparel and footwear category’s specific data needs. Together, they are said to have calculated more than 150,000 emissions factors for over 650 fashion material categories and more than 200 textile processes. Carbonfact for Suppliers has also collected impact information from over 7,000 factories. On a daily basis, the platforms perform 2 million LCAs for customers.  

Per Laurent, carbon accounting tools that are not designed for fashion’s complex supply chains can provide insights on Scope 1 and 2, but they often struggle to get a solid read on Scope 3 impact, which accounts for 80 to 90 percent of an apparel or footwear brand’s footprint. There is also a lack of specificity with tools that use spending as the basis to calculate impact.

“If you actually want to decarbonize, not just report, you need to know which factory dyed the fabric, what its energy mix is and what the bill of materials really contains,” said Laurent. “That’s how you find the levers worth pulling, and getting that data takes people who know how garments are made and how suppliers actually work.”

Product-level data is becoming more important to meet disclosure requirements in France’s Environmental Cost labeling system that requires a numerical impact score on textile products, California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act that will require greenhouse gas emissions reporting and DPP regulations coming into effect next year.

Carbonfact’s next evolution will be developing what it has dubbed “environmental intelligence.” With the help of AI, the platform intends to give more individuals and teams within a company access to data insights that can help them shrink their footprints.

“Decarbonizing fashion is the shared mission that led to the creation of Carbonfact and Vaayu, and why bringing the two platforms together matters,” Laurent wrote in a blog post on Carbonfact’s website. “The more brands working on a shared foundation, the faster the industry can move from measuring its impact to reducing it.”