Cadillac may seem a bit too traditional to hang its driving cap on EVs. And yet, that hasn’t stopped the GM brand from rolling out — or at least showing off — four all-electric vehicle models since 2022. The latest is the 2025 Optiq, a mid-size crossover that could finally snag the young, hipster customers […]
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Cadillac may seem a bit too traditional to hang its driving cap on EVs. And yet, that hasn’t stopped the GM brand from rolling out — or at least showing off — four all-electric vehicle models since 2022. The latest is the 2025 Optiq, a mid-size crossover that could finally snag the young, hipster customers […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer. The Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, which was revealed Monday evening at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is the product of a partnership between Aurora and […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen later developed Class, a Zoom add-on, during the pandemic to help teachers make better use of Zoom in a classroom […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
French startup Carbonfact believes that the best carbon accounting solutions will focus on one vertical. That’s why the company has decided to provide a carbon management and reporting tool for the fashion industry exclusively.
And Carbonfact recently raised a $15 million funding round led by Alven, the French VC firm that led Carbonfact’s seed round in 2022 already. Other investors in the round include Headline and a follow-on investment from Y Combinator.
Big companies in the fashion industry (and other industries) need to come up with a carbon accounting strategy as regulation is changing in Europe and the U.S. with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and the NY Fashion Act.
That’s why there has been a boom in carbon accounting platforms. The biggest ones like Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Greenly have an industry-agnostic approach. They help you track your carbon emissions and create reports in a more or less automated way.
Just like Carbon Maps focuses exclusively on the food industry, Carbonfact is focusing on the fashion industry so that its product can be more granular and more specific.
“For these industries – food is a very good example, fashion is a very good example – you need to be accurate in your calculations and you need industry-specific tools to model virtual products and improve your product offering in the future,” Carbonfact co-founder and CEO Marc Laurent told me.
In more practical details, Carbonfact retrieves your existing data from your ERP and other internal systems. It then calculates the footprints for each product using a lifecycle assessment engine that is specifically designed for clothing items.
“[Clients] also have data in what they call PLM [Product Lifecycle Management software ] — that’s the software in which they put all the product data. This is where you’ll find the product recipe sheets. And they sometimes have data in traceability platforms, such as Retraced, Trustrace, Fairly Made in France, etc. And finally, they sometimes have data in Excel files,” Laurent said.
After centralizing and normalizing all data in a single platform, as the fashion industry relies on a cascade of suppliers, Carbonfact wants to help you calculate your scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions — scope 3 emissions in particular encompass indirect emissions from third-party suppliers.
The startup first gives you a broad idea of your main emission hotspots with an uncertainty range. It then helps you prioritize data collection with your suppliers to refine your data and improve your carbon reporting.
After that, Carbonfact can become your carbon footprint dashboard. You can generate broad reports and drill down at an SKU-based level to see the environmental cost of each product. The platform can then be used to run what-if scenarios to see if you should change a material, move to a new country of manufacturing or change your transport methods.
Image Credits: Carbonfact
While many companies will focus first on CO2-equivalent metrics, Carbonfact can also be used to track other metrics, such as water consumption, French eco-labels and other environmental indicators — in the carbon accounting industry, they call these indicators the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules, or PEFCR for short.
And Carbonfact has already onboarded over 150 apparel and footwear brands, including New Balance, Columbia, Carhartt and Allbirds. “We track 100% of their subsidiaries, 100% of their suppliers, 100% of their products,” Laurent said.
Each client pays tens of thousands of dollars per year to use Carbonfact. With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we consider that a client pays around $20,000 per year on average, it means that the French startup already generates at least $3 million in annual recurring revenue.
It’s clear that sustainability management software is a growing segment in the world of enterprise software. But it’s also a young sector. So it’s going to be interesting to see if several industry-specific platforms can become large companies or if there will be some consolidation down the road.
IT operations personnel have a lot going on, and when an incident occurs that brings down a key system, time is always going to be against them. Over the years, companies have looked for an edge in getting up faster with playbooks designed to find answers to common problems, and postmortems to keep them from repeating, but not every problem is easily solved, and there is so much data and so many possible points of failure.
It’s actually a perfect problem for generative AI to solve, and AIOps startup BigPanda announced a new generative AI tool today called Biggy to help solve some of these issues faster. Biggy is designed to look across a wide variety of IT-related data to learn how the company operates and compare it to the problem scenario and other similar scenarios and suggest a solution.
BigPanda has been using AI since the early days of the company and deliberately designed two separate systems: one for the data layer and another for the AI. This in a way prepared them for this shift to generative AI based on large language models. “The AI engine before Gen AI was building a lot of other types of AI, but it was feeding off of the same data engine that will be feeding what we’re doing with Biggy, and what we’re doing with generative and conversational AI,” BigPanda CEO Assaf Resnick told TechCrunch.
Like most generative AI tools, this one makes a prompt box available where users can ask questions and interact with the bot. In this case, the underlying models have been trained on data inside the customer company, as well as on publicly available data on a particular piece of hardware or software, and are tuned to deal with the kinds of problems IT deals with on a regular basis.
“The out-of-the box LLMs have been trained on a huge amount of data, and they’re really good actually as generalists in all of the operational fields we look at — infrastructure, network, application development, everything there. And they actually know all the hardware very well,” Jason Walker, chief innovation officer at BigPanda, said. “So if you ask it about a certain HP blade server with this error code, it’s pretty good at putting that together, and we use that for a lot of the event traffic.” Of course, it has to be more than that or a human engineer could simply look this up in Google Search.
It combines this knowledge with what it is able to cull internally across a range of data types. “BigPanda ingests the customer’s operational and contextual data from observability, change, CDMB (the file that stores configuration information) and topology along with historical data and human, institutional context — and normalizes the data into key-value pairs, or tags,” Walker said. That’s a lot of technical jargon, but basically it means it looks at system-level information, organizational data and human interactions to deliver a response to help engineers solve the problem.
When a user enters a prompt, it looks across all the data to generate an answer that will hopefully point the engineers in the right direction to fix the problem. They acknowledge that it’s not always perfect because no generative AI is, but they let the user know when there is a lower degree of certainty that the answer is correct.
“For areas where we think we don’t have as much certainty, then we tell them that this is our best information, but a human should take a look at this,” Resnick said. For other areas where there is more certainty, they may introduce automation, working with a tool like Red Hat Ansible to solve the issue without human interaction, he said.
The data ingestion part isn’t always going to be trivial for customers, and this is a first step toward providing an AI assistant that can help IT get at the root of problems and solve them faster. No AI is foolproof, but having an interactive AI tool should be an improvement over current, more time-consuming manual approaches to IT systems troubleshooting.
It’s easy to assume the e-commerce ship has sailed when you consider we have giant outfits like Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix dominating the sector. But the opportunity for e-commerce platforms that cater to brands remain vast and fertile, since so many smaller businesses continue foraying into the internet in the wake of the pandemic.
Further evidence of this has surfaced in the form of one of the largest fundraises by a startup in Turkey, given that the average Series A usually comes in at below $15 million. E-commerce platform ikas has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round as it seeks to expand its operations into new markets in Europe. The company currently operates in Turkey and Germany, and says its platform simplifies store management for companies that want to have a digital presence.
The investment was led by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) fund, a venture arm of the World Bank Group.
ikas’ co-founder and CEO Mustafa Namoğlu told TechCrunch that the company would be using the new funding for international expansion in Eastern Europe and the DaCH region.
“Most of Europe is predominantly neglected or underserved by those U.S.-based giants,” he said. “The global platforms lack customer service in local languages. It looks easy to start with, for example, a Shopify. But once you start, you need to add other plugins, and you may even need an agency to run it.”
Namoğlu said ikas can win customers against other platforms because it’s more of a “fire and forget” platform. “The first reason our merchants pick us over others is storefront speed, which gives them higher conversion rates. You get this out of the box, even if you pay us €30 per month. The second reason is customer service. Thirdly, we bundle the payments and the shipping labels into our core product, which means you don’t need to go and negotiate with payment providers or shipping labels. You’re immediately ready to go,” he said.
Namoğlu previously founded MUGO, a fashion distribution and retail company, and launched ikas in 2017 with co-founders Tugay Karaçay, Ömercan Çelikler and Umut Ozan Yildirim.
The IFC invests directly in companies as well as through PE and VC funds.
Also investing in ikas is Re-Pie Asset Management, which has grocery delivery startup Getir in its portfolio. The round saw participation from ikas’ existing investor Revo Capital, best known as the first institutional investor in Getir, Param, Midas and Roamless.
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