Carbonfact Acquires Vaayu to Create Fashion's Largest Environmental Data Platform with 300 Brand Customers

Carbonfact, the Paris-founded environmental data platform used by more than 200 apparel and footwear brands, has acquired Berlin-based Vaayu, one of fashion's first product impact platforms with more than 100 brand customers, combining the two largest sustainability data platforms in the fashion industry into a single unified offering. The combined platform now serves more than 300 apparel and footwear brands including On, Ganni, The North Face, Burton, New Balance, Axel Arigato and Asket, creating the largest network of fashion brands working on a single environmental data foundation. The merger responds directly to the incoming wave of product-level environmental disclosure requirements including the Digital Product Passport, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the French Eco-Score, CSRD, California's SB 253 and the Empowering Consumers Directive, all of which require defensible environmental data at the individual product rather than corporate level.

 

The Strategic Rationale for the Merger

 

Both companies were founded on the same conviction that decarbonisation in fashion is fundamentally a data problem requiring purpose-built platforms rather than retrofitted generic tools. Carbonfact, founded in Paris in 2021, focused on building the environmental data infrastructure for corporate-level carbon accounting and product lifecycle assessment across a broad brand customer base. Vaayu, founded in Berlin in 2020 by Namrata Sandhu, pioneered product-level climate data for fashion brands seeking granular emissions intelligence rather than aggregate reporting metrics. Bringing the two platforms together addresses the gap between corporate-level reporting infrastructure and product-level granularity that the next generation of regulatory requirements demands.

Sandhu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vaayu, said the company started to give retail and fashion companies the granular, product-level climate data they need to actually decarbonise rather than just report on it. She said Carbonfact shares that conviction and that together the combined platform can deliver it at the scale the industry now requires, with customers receiving the same rigour they trust paired with the compliance coverage their next chapter demands. Marc Laurent, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Carbonfact, framed the acquisition as creating what the industry has been missing: a single, comprehensive, product-level environmental dataset serving the full spectrum of decarbonisation and reporting needs.

 

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The Combined Platform's Technical Capabilities

 

The merged Carbonfact platform brings together more than 150,000 fashion-specific emission factors covering the materials, processes and finishes that appear in apparel and footwear bills of materials, alongside more than 200 textile-specific processes and 650-plus material categories across 144 countries. The platform performs 2 million product textile and footwear lifecycle assessments daily, drawing on energy data from more than 7,000 textile factories collected through Carbonfact for Suppliers. More than 50 patented materials and processes are covered, with 7,500-plus bespoke emission factors created for individual brand needs, providing the granularity required for defensible product-level disclosure.

The platform covers the full environmental workflow on a single dataset and methodology, spanning GHG Protocol-compliant carbon accounting reviewed by PwC, PEFCR-aligned lifecycle assessments at the SKU level, eco-design and hotspot analysis for decarbonisation planning aligned to SBTi targets, and environmental reporting across the Digital Product Passport, French Eco-Score, CSRD and SBTi frameworks. The single-dataset approach is commercially significant because it eliminates the methodology inconsistencies that arise when brands use separate tools for measurement, reporting and reduction planning, creating a coherent evidence base that regulators, auditors and investors can rely on across all disclosure contexts.

 

The Regulatory Imperative Driving Consolidation

 

The convergence of multiple product-level environmental disclosure requirements across European and United States jurisdictions is fundamentally reshaping what fashion brands need from their sustainability data infrastructure. Spend-based emissions estimates, which have been adequate for early-stage corporate sustainability reporting, are no longer sufficient for the product-level granularity required by the Digital Product Passport and ESPR, which will require brands to disclose the environmental credentials of individual products at the point of sale. This shift from corporate reporting to product reporting creates demand for the type of primary supply chain data and material-level emission factors that Carbonfact and Vaayu have been building independently.

The French Eco-Score, which requires quantified environmental scores for consumer products, and California's SB 253 supply chain emissions reporting requirement add further layers of complexity that brands must navigate simultaneously across different geographies. A platform that can generate the required outputs for multiple regulatory frameworks from a single underlying dataset offers significant operational efficiency compared with maintaining separate reporting processes for each jurisdiction. As the regulatory landscape continues to evolve, the combined Carbonfact platform's breadth of coverage provides brands with resilience against the addition of further requirements.

 

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Outlook for Fashion Sustainability Data and Environmental Intelligence

 

Carbonfact's next development direction is what it describes as Environmental Intelligence, an AI-powered layer designed to make complex climate expertise accessible and actionable for every team within a fashion organisation. As the volume of product-level data grows through expanded brand participation and supply chain data collection, the primary challenge shifts from data collection to deriving actionable insight that enables genuine emissions reduction rather than compliance reporting alone. AI-enabled analysis could help brands identify the highest-impact reduction opportunities across their product portfolios, supplier relationships and material specifications in ways that are currently too complex and time-consuming for manual approaches.

Whether Carbonfact can successfully integrate the Vaayu team and customer base while developing the Environmental Intelligence capability represents a significant execution challenge over the coming months. Sustained delivery would establish Carbonfact as the definitive environmental data infrastructure provider for the global fashion industry and position it as a central enabler of the sector's transition from measuring impact to reducing it. The combination of the largest brand customer network, the most comprehensive fashion-specific emission factor library and an AI-powered intelligence layer creates a platform competitive moat that will be difficult for new entrants or generalist sustainability software providers to overcome.

 

 

Source: Carbonfact