WATERSHED

Taylor Francis, Avi Itskovich, and Christian Anderson all worked at Stripe before leaving in 2019 to build something in climate. They had watched Stripe become the infrastructure layer for internet commerce — and they wanted to build the equivalent for corporate carbon data.

The founding insight was simple and frustrating: major companies had no reliable way to measure their own emissions. Their sustainability teams were running on spreadsheets, consultants, and guesswork.

None of it was audit-ready. None of it was comparable across companies.

And regulators were starting to ask for numbers.

Watershed spent the first year deep in customer conversations with sustainability leads at large enterprises. What they heard: the data problem was everywhere and getting worse.

They built a platform that automated the collection of emissions data across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, turned it into clean reports compliant with GHG Protocol and TCFD standards, and gave companies a starting point for actual reduction planning — not just reporting theater.

Sequoia Capital led their $70 million Series A in 2021. By that point, they had proved the product worked with real enterprise customers.

The money went into expanding the team and building out the regulatory compliance modules that companies urgently needed.

Watershed sells annual SaaS subscriptions to large enterprises. Companies pay to use the platform for carbon measurement, reporting, and reduction planning.

Pricing scales with company size, emissions scope, and reporting complexity. The demand is partially regulatory — the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the SEC's proposed climate disclosure rules mean that large companies face mandatory reporting requirements.

Watershed turns those mandates into a standardized, auditable product rather than a custom consulting engagement every year.

A second revenue line comes from their accounting firm partnerships: firms like Deloitte and KPMG use Watershed's platform to deliver climate audits to their own clients, creating a distribution channel into the enterprise market.

The core carbon measurement platform automates data collection across all three emissions scopes — direct operations, purchased energy, and the full supply chain. It connects to a company's financial systems, utility accounts, and supplier data to build a real-time emissions picture rather than an annual manual exercise.

The reporting module generates audit-ready documents compliant with GHG Protocol, CDP, TCFD, SEC climate disclosure formats, and the EU's CSRD. For companies facing multiple simultaneous reporting requirements, this is the product that saves months of internal work.

The reduction planning tools model decarbonization scenarios — showing which interventions reduce emissions most cost-effectively and helping companies build credible net-zero roadmaps. The supplier engagement tools help large companies collect emissions data from their supply chains, which is typically the hardest and most important part of a company's Scope 3 footprint.

Watershed's growth had two engines. The first was marquee customer logos — Airbnb, Walmart, DoorDash, Sweetgreen — that made it easy to sell the next Fortune 500 company.

When a sustainability director at a large consumer brand sees that Airbnb uses Watershed, the sales conversation gets shorter.

The second engine was accounting firms. Watershed struck partnerships with global accounting firms who needed carbon audit capabilities for their clients.

Those partnerships turned auditors into a sales force — firms recommending Watershed to their enterprise clients as the right tool to comply with the reporting standards they were being audited against.

The regulatory tailwind did the rest. Every deadline for CSRD or SEC climate disclosure pushed another wave of enterprises into the market looking for a solution.

Watershed was already there.

Regulatory uncertainty is the core risk. The SEC's climate disclosure rule has faced significant legal challenges and its timeline has been pushed back.

If mandatory emissions reporting requirements weaken or get delayed, the urgency that drives enterprise buying decisions weakens too. Companies that were racing to comply suddenly have more time — and more reason to use cheaper alternatives.

The other challenge is competition. Persefoni, Sweep, Greenly, Normative, and a dozen others are building similar platforms.

Every major consulting firm is building its own carbon accounting capability. Watershed's moat is product quality and brand reputation, but neither of those is technically defensible at scale.

The company that builds the deepest integrations with enterprise ERP systems (SAP, Oracle) and locks in audit workflows will be hardest to displace.

Sequoia Capital led both the $70 million Series A in 2021 and the $100 million Series B in January 2022. Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures, and GV (Google Ventures) also participated in the Series B.

Greenoaks Capital Partners led the $200 million Series C in June 2023, which valued the company at $1.8 billion. The Sequoia and Kleiner backing gave Watershed serious enterprise sales credibility early — their portfolio companies were among the first customers.