Supporting our startups in their sustainable transition

Carbon footprint measurement should be easy

Before asking our portfolio companies to start measuring their carbon footprint, we needed to do it ourselves. In order to answer the common question from our portfolio “which provider should we choose for our Carbon Footprint assessment?” we’ve benchmarked 9 providers to better understand how carbon footprint is measured.

Surprise, that’s not an easy one. If you want an accurate carbon footprint measurement, you need a provider who:

• Uses a good combination of carbon calculation methodologies (there are 4 main ways to calculate carbon footprint)
• Understands your sector and its particularities
• Can deal with your scope 3 (analysis of your providers)
• Can easily engage your team (mandatory to calculate scope 1)
• Whose carbon audit is accepted by the ADEME (for France) or GHG Protocol (for international)
• Gives you an easy access to your data, facilitate data collection and a way to update it 
• … (I won’t list all the criteria, you’ll get scared)

One this benchmark was done, we’ve shared the results  with our portfolio companies and  started to measure our own carbon footprint in june 2021 (we’ll share the result soon!)

What is the program about? 

Thanks to this experience, we have been able to design a program that helps startups to start building their carbon impact reduction strategy. 

The program is open to all our portfolio companies and is extended to 5 external companies that will be selected randomly (Want to apply? Do it here!)

Once  the program, startups can : 

• Access  our carbon footprint providers benchmark ;
• Get an exclusive discount with Sami, the carbon footprint provider selected by XAnge after conducting a benchmark of 9 providers ;
• Reduce their  learning curves thanks to peers Q&A sessions with experts ;
• Start defining their impact strategy thanks to specific workshops.

The program starts on September 23rd, until December 14th. It requires approximately 5 days of FTE. 

Why should you join the program? 

Above the societal challenge of carbon impact reduction for companies (we consider that’s enough  to push the program to our portfolio), carbon footprint measurement will be more and more asked by customers and talents. 

As Managing Partner Cyril said at Frenchweb mic, “The key to success for a startup is knowing how to hire the very best people. An advanced  societal engagement is very effective to help companies hire talents within the new generations”.

It’s just a beginning 

During the last months, we’ve strengthened our societal engagement : 

• We’ve signed the Climate Act and are currently doing our Carbon footprint measurement,
• We’ve signed Sista’s convention and have been delighted to welcome 3 new female investors,
• We are currently working with Ronalpia, an inclusive acceleration program to encourage entrepreneurship for people from minorities, to support their entrepreneurs to raise funds.

But it’s just a beginning, we are working on new initiatives that we’ll share soon!

In the meanwhile, we sincerely hope that our initiative will contribute  to unlock the first step of carbon emission reduction journey. If you think the program can help a company, don’t hesitate to spread the word! All information here: https://xangevc.wixsite.com/carbon-footprint