The climate crisis is creating massive demand for data capture as industries grapple with how to decarbonize. Put simply, you can\u2019t cut your carbon emissions if don\u2019t know what they are in the first place.<\/p>\n
This need to gather data is a big opportunity for startups \u2014 and a wave of early companies<\/a> have already been founded to try to plug the sustainability data gap, through things like APIs <\/a>to assess emissions for carbon offsetting (which in turn has led to other startups trying to tackle the data gap around offsetting projects<\/a>\u2026).<\/p>\n One thing is clear: Requirements for sustainability reporting are only going to get broader and deeper from here on in.<\/p>\n Munich-based Tanso<\/a> is an early stage startup (founded this year) that\u2019s building software to support sustainability reporting for a particular sector (industrial manufacturers) \u2014 with the goal of creating a data management system that can automate data capture and sustainability reporting geared towards the specific needs of the sector.<\/p>\n The startup says it decided to focus on industrial manufacturing because it\u2019s both an emissions-heavy sector and underserved with supportive digital tech vs many other industries.<\/p>\n The founders met during their studies at universities in Munich and Zurich \u2014 where they\u2019d been researching the assessment of organizational climate impact. Their collective expertise crystalized into the realization of a business opportunity to build a data management system for a notoriously polluting sector that\u2019s facing a mandate to change.<\/p>\n In the coming years, European regulations will expand sustainability reporting requirements \u2014 with the EU\u2019s \u2018Green Deal\u2019 plan setting an overarching goal of Europe becoming the first \u201cclimate-neutral\u201d continent by 2050.<\/p>\n Specific (existing) reporting requirements within the bloc include the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which will apply to more than 50,000 companies \u2014 requiring they report on their sustainability metrics, starting in 2023.<\/p>\n The UK (now outside the EU) already introduced some reporting requirements for domestic companies, under the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) regulation, which has applied since 2019 and applies to over 12,000 businesses in the UK in varying degrees of detail depending on the size of the company.<\/p>\n So there is a clear direction of travel in the region requiring businesses to gather and report sustainability data.<\/p>\n Tanso has just closed a $1.9 million pre-seed raise with the aim of getting its data management support software to market in time for an expected surge in demand as sustainability regulations like CSRD start to bite.<\/p>\n The raise is led by German early stage b2b fund UVC Partners, with participation from Picus Capital, Possible Ventures, and a number of business angels.<\/p>\n Tanso is still in the RD\/product development phase, with co-founder Gyri Reiersen telling TechCrunch it\u2019s currently working with a number of manufacturers to \u201cfigure out the sweet spot\u201d for automating data gathering so it can come to market with a scalable product offering. She says the team raised a relatively large pre-seed exactly to see it through until it\u2019s got something fit to launch (it\u2019s hoping to have something \u201csolid, verified and scalable\u201d by the end of 2022, per Reiersen).<\/p>\n The goal for the product is a single platform that gathers and holds all the customer\u2019s sustainability data and can automate the generation of reports to meet regulatory requirements \u2014 including auditing.<\/p>\n From 2025, Reiersen points out that CSRD reporting needs to be \u201cauditable\u201d, meaning that you have to have \u201csome form of transparency and traceability\u201d; and also that the \u201ccorrectness\u201d of sustainability reporting will be a C-Suite responsibility. So that must concentrate boardroom minds.<\/p>\n \u201cGoing beyond that it\u2019s all about how can you use this data and the insights that the data gives you to make predictions and models going forward for how should we develop our products? What makes sense to do going forward to make?\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re prototyping currently is to streamline the workflow of information gathering,\u201d Reiersen also tells us, discussing the product dev process. \u201cAlso to have really good, fundamental user-flow for the users to use our product. And then doing the deep dives on integrations over time.\u201d<\/p>\n She says the challenge is finding the trade-off between usability and \u201cdigging into the data\u201d. \u201cFor us it\u2019s very important to have a scalable product, especially having it fully scalable from 2023 when the CSRD are started because then there will be desperation on the market. Companies will need to have something,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to have these solutions\u2026 that take one step in the right direction for all companies and not just have a couple of carbon neutral companies\u2026 So for us it\u2019s more about finding the productizable use-cases in the beginning to make this a scalable product.\u201d<\/p>\n But she also warns over a proliferation of overly \u201cshallow\u201d offerings in the space \u2014 driven by marketing-led \u2018greenwashing\u2019 (and bogus carbon offsetting) rather than a genuine desire to correctly identify the problem and course-correct which is what\u2019s actually needed for humanity to avert climate disaster.<\/p>\n Reiersen adds that she got really interested in this space through her university work researching the overestimation of carbon offsets through deep learning.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is such a need for accountability and making sure that the product that is being developed actually do their job correctly. Because it\u2019s so easy to just have a black box and trust it. We can\u2019t afford having systems that overestimate or underestimate. It needs to be accurate and it needs to be validated,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cGoing forward accuracy will mean more and more and then you need to access the \u2018real data\u2019 and not just \u2018guestimations\u2019,\u201d she predicts. \u201cAnd that\u2019s where we see that of course we need to be very front-end\/UX-friendly, and making it easy for people to enter the right data and have a very user-friendly, usable product and that people are guided through the process of gathering the right data\u2026 but also over time really focusing on how do you integrate and get access to the data at the data-base level?\u201d<\/p>\n\n