SUSTAINABILITY
THE AUDITOR
Watershed built carbon accounting for companies that get audited. Founded in 2019 by former Stripe employees, Watershed has become an enterprise standard for measuring, reporting and cutting emissions, and its client list is pure finance: four of the top six US banks, six of the top ten private equity firms, plus BlackRock, Visa, Stripe and KKR. Last valued at US $ 1.8bn, it has raised around US $ 185m from investors including Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. The San Francisco company’ s pitch is aimed squarely at the CFO. Watershed sells“ audit-grade” carbon accounting, data granular and documented enough to survive an auditor, then bolts on dedicated software for Europe’ s CSRD and California’ s new disclosure laws. The company says every customer footprint that has gone through
The vast majority of carbon footprints that are done the traditional way have some sort of material misstatement
third-party assurance has passed, across the 1.9 gigatons of CO2e now measured on the platform. That is the whole proposition in a phrase. As emissions move from the sustainability report into the audited accounts, Watershed is betting that finance teams will pay for numbers that hold up under the same scrutiny as the balance sheet.“ The vast majority of carbon footprints that are done the traditional way have some sort of material misstatement,” notes Taylor Francis, Co-Founder at Watershed.
THE PITCH
Carbon accounting platform that measures, reports and cuts emissions on auditgrade data.
Taylor Francis, Co-founder Watershed