When two innovation leaders become one
We sat down with with Marc Laurent, Co-Founder & CEO at Carbonfact, to hear about the Carbofact x Vaayu acquisition.
In most acquisition stories, there’s a clear narrative: one company wins, one gets absorbed. A larger player buys a smaller one, rolls up the technology, and moves on. That’s not what happened here.
When Carbonfact acquired Vaayu about a week ago, two pioneering fashion innovators - both growing, both with genuine customer traction - chose to stop building in parallel and start building together. Vaayu had 100+ brands. Carbonfact had 200+. Neither was running out of road.
So why now? And why each other?
For us, this is a rare and instructive moment. It raises questions we think are worth asking openly: about mission versus momentum, about what consolidation looks like when it’s driven by conviction rather than necessity, and about what it actually takes to build lasting infrastructure for an industry that urgently needs to decarbonise.
We sat down with Marc Laurent, Co-Founder & CEO at Carbonfact, to hear the story in his own words.
Q: Neither company needed this deal. What was the honest internal conversation that led you here, and when did it start?
Sustainability software is going through the same consolidation every category goes through eventually. Customers want more from their platforms, and they want it at lower cost. Sustainability teams have shrunk; the budgets behind them have shrunk too, especially after the CSRD delay loosened the regulatory urgency that was funding a lot of this work in 2023 and 2024. In that environment, having two well-built, fashion-specific platforms in the market doesn’t serve brands as well as one does.
The conversation with Namrata started in earnest earlier this year. We’d known each other in the market for a long time, often appearing on the same shortlists, and we’d both watched the sector consolidate around us, with Diginex acquiring Plan A in Germany and several smaller deals on the French side. The question we ended up answering together was a practical one: what’s the outcome that serves Vaayu’s customers best? Continuity on a platform that can carry the scientific work forward, or another year of running parallel.
Q: Was there a specific signal that made consolidation feel urgent? Did you both reach that conclusion at the same time?
There wasn’t one trigger so much as several pointing the same way. On regulation, the two-year CSRD delay was a clear signal – it tightened budgets just as teams needed to invest. The DPP timeline becoming clearer in late 2025 was another: it made obvious that in the next two years, product data will play an increasingly important role instead of just corporate data. And on the customer side, the shrinking of sustainability teams meant brands were actively looking for fewer, more capable tools.
Q: Two founders, two cultures, Paris and Berlin. How did you build trust to make this a genuine partnership rather than a simple acquisition?
To clarify, it is an acquisition not a merger: Carbonfact has acquired Vaayu, the customers are moving across, and the Vaayu brand and platform will be retired after the transition. What I’d want to be clear about is that we’re not absorbing Vaayu and discarding it. We’re bringing across five years of scientific work - proprietary emission factors and a body of LCA studies their team built - and that becomes part of the reference data every brand on the platform draws from.
What I will say is that the way you do an acquisition matters a lot. Namrata cared deeply about the outcome for her customers, and she was direct and pragmatic in every conversation about how to get there. That made it possible to structure the deal so that continuity for those customers sits at the centre, rather than treating them as a list of contracts to be reassigned. Trust in this kind of process is built by being honest about what’s on the table and what isn’t, and by agreeing on the things that matter most. For us, that’s the customer outcome and the integrity of the scientific work Vaayu’s team had done.
Q: Where is the category heading in two years, and what would have been harder to build independently?
Over the next two years, the category moves from measurement to action, but only for brands with the data to act on. That’s the divide: credible, product-level environmental data is what separates the brands that can act from the brands that can’t, and it shows up in two places: regulation, where DPP, the Eco-Score and SB 253 demand defensible product-level numbers, and product design, where you can only choose the lower-impact material if your data is accurate enough to tell two options apart.
What’s harder to build independently is the data network itself. Emission factor libraries get more accurate as more brands and suppliers contribute to them, and LCA models get more reliable as they’re tested against more product types. Two separate platforms each running their own version of this means two slower-improving datasets; one consolidated platform means a network that compounds faster. Bringing Vaayu’s five years of scientific work together with ours is what gets us there faster than either could independently.
Q: Marc – what specific capability or dataset did Vaayu have that Carbonfact couldn’t replicate quickly?
It comes down to data. Vaayu spent five years building out datasets specific to apparel and footwear – proprietary emission factors and a body of LCA studies grounded in real work with suppliers and materials. Bringing those across widens the reference data the combined platform runs on: more emission factors, more product types modelled, more material and supplier coverage feeding the library every brand draws from. That kind of primary, industry-specific data is the product of years of work, and breadth like that isn’t something you shortcut. It’s the hardest part of this to replicate quickly.
Q: What was the hardest conversation you each had with your existing customers?
For Vaayu’s customers, the honest conversation was about the brand being retired, as no one likes hearing the product they chose is going away. The reassurance is that they are not starting over and they are not redoing the data work. We’re migrating their data into the Carbonfact model and bringing it across, so the footprint they’ve already built comes with them. They pick up where they left off rather than re-collecting data and rebuilding from scratch.
Q: Vaayu was backed by Fashion for Good. What was the most valuable thing your investors gave you beyond capital, and what do you wish you’d had earlier?
Namrata Sandhu (CEO, Vaayu) says:
The most valuable thing Fashion for Good gave us was direct access to the brands that needed us most. For a climate-tech startup, those introductions were catalysts, FFG’s credibility opened doors to leading fashion brands that wanted our impact modeling and decarbonisation platform, faster than we ever could have on our own.
What we wish we’d had earlier? That ecosystem, sooner. Building in a fast-moving space is a race against time, and deep industry involvement isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s what determines your pace.
Q: For other Fashion for Good portfolio founders watching two strong companies consolidate rather than compete – what’s the one thing you’d want them to take from this?
When teams are shrinking and budgets tightening, depth and scale serve customers better than another fragmented tool. Footwear and apparel companies should be able to focus on which reduction levers they can pull in order to decarbonise, instead of being stuck in a paradox of choice between smaller companies who offer similar platforms, but with massive differences in depth of features and service, accuracy and granularity.
Q: What does success look like in two years? How will you know this was the right call?
A few markers. The first is migration: Vaayu’s roughly one hundred customers landing on Carbonfact and continuing their work without losing ground. That one matters enormously to us.
But the real measure is whether we’ve moved the industry from measuring its impact to reducing it. As product-level data grows, the hard part stops being “collecting it”, and becomes “making sense of it.” That’s what we’re building toward with Environmental Intelligence: an AI-powered layer that turns climate expertise into something every team can act on, so brands move beyond reporting to actually cutting their impact. In two years, success will be visible by brands that aren’t just reporting, but actually decarbonising.