SWEEP

Rachel Delacour had already been through the startup cycle. She co-founded BIME Analytics, a business intelligence software company, and sold it to Zendesk in 2015.

By 2020, she was ready to build again — and she chose climate.

The founding conversation with co-founder Alexis Normand centered on a frustrating gap in the carbon accounting market. Everyone was building tools to measure emissions from a company's own operations and energy use — the easy stuff.

Nobody was solving the supply chain problem. For most manufacturers, retailers, and brands, Scope 3 emissions (what their suppliers emit making the products and services they buy) represent 70-90% of their total footprint.

Without addressing that, any carbon accounting platform was producing numbers that understated reality by an enormous margin.

Sweep built specifically to engage supply chains. The platform doesn't just measure your own emissions — it helps you contact your suppliers, collect their emissions data, benchmark supplier performance, and manage the upstream carbon footprint that most companies still have no visibility into.

Balderton Capital led a $22 million Series A in October 2021. Coatue Management led a $73 million Series B in April 2022, with EQT Ventures and Balderton participating.

The European VC backing reflected the timing: EU climate regulation was accelerating fast, and Sweep was positioned directly in its path.

Sweep sells annual SaaS subscriptions to enterprises that need to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions — with a particular focus on supply chain (Scope 3) emissions. Pricing scales with company size and the number of suppliers being engaged.

The platform's unique value is the supplier engagement layer. Enterprises don't just get a dashboard of their own emissions — they get tools to send standardized questionnaires to suppliers, collect emissions data in a common format, and track which suppliers are making progress on reduction.

That engagement layer creates network effects: the more companies use Sweep to collect supplier data, the richer the supplier database becomes across the platform.

The regulatory driver is Europe's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which requires detailed emissions reporting — including Scope 3 supply chain data — from large companies operating in the EU. The CSRD covers around 50,000 companies, creating a massive addressable market with a hard deadline.

The emissions measurement platform covers Scopes 1, 2, and 3 — tracking direct emissions, purchased energy, and the full supply chain footprint with automated data collection where possible and structured manual collection where not.

The supply chain engagement module is Sweep's differentiator. It lets companies send standardized emissions surveys to suppliers, track response rates, validate supplier data, and generate a Scope 3 footprint based on actual supplier disclosures rather than industry estimates.

The CSRD reporting module generates the detailed sustainability reports required under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive — the primary regulatory driver for Sweep's European customer base.

The reduction roadmap builder helps companies model decarbonization pathways across their own operations and supply chains, prioritizing interventions by cost and impact.

Sweep launched in Europe first, which was a smart sequencing decision. European companies were already under regulatory pressure from the CSRD and earlier EU sustainability reporting directives.

Sweep built CSRD compliance into the product from day one — so when the deadline pressure hit, the product was already tuned for exactly what companies needed.

Rachel Delacour's previous exit to Zendesk gave her enterprise sales credibility that first-time founders in climate typically lack. She could get meetings with procurement and sustainability teams at large companies faster than most startups at a similar stage.

The supply chain angle also created a viral mechanism. When a large company uses Sweep to send carbon surveys to 300 of its suppliers, those suppliers suddenly have an incentive to get on the platform too — so they can respond efficiently and demonstrate their own sustainability credentials to future customers.

Customers become distribution.

The CSRD timeline has been complicated by EU politics, with some reporting requirements being pushed back or simplified under pressure from industry. Every delay reduces the urgency that drives enterprise buying decisions.

Companies have shown they will postpone sustainability software investments if the regulatory deadline looks flexible.

Sweep is also competing on two fronts simultaneously: against Watershed and Persefoni for enterprise carbon platform deals, and against specialized supply chain sustainability tools from companies like EcoVadis and Sedex. Building depth in both areas at once — general carbon accounting and deep supply chain engagement — requires more product resources than a pure-play competitor.

Being Paris-headquartered is both an advantage (EU market timing) and a challenge (selling into large US enterprises requires local presence and trust-building that takes time).

Balderton Capital led the $22 million Series A in October 2021 — one of Europe's leading enterprise software investors. Coatue Management led the $73 million Series B in April 2022, joined by EQT Ventures and Balderton.

Coatue's involvement is notable: they're primarily a US-based growth fund and their bet on Sweep signals confidence that European climate SaaS can scale globally. EQT Ventures connects Sweep to one of Europe's largest PE and venture platforms.