Investment led by Astorg and BeyondNetZero, General Atlantic’s climate investing venture; ratings and insights leader leverages sustainability intelligence to fundamentally transform supply chains, private equity, ESG-linked loans, climate impact and more
EcoVadis, the leading provider of globally trusted business sustainability ratings, has raised $500M with plans to accelerate its vision of influencing every business decision with sustainability intelligence, becoming a sustainability impact unicorn.
The global investment round – the largest equity fundraising for a sustainability data SaaS company to date – brings EcoVadis’ total capital raised to over $725M and was led by Astorg and BeyondNetZero, General Atlantic’s climate investing venture, with participation from Singapore-based GIC Private Limited and Princeville Capital.
“This investment is validation of EcoVadis’ model for scaling impact across global value chains, despite the pandemic, geopolitical or financial headwinds,” said Frédéric Trinel, co-founder and co-CEO of EcoVadis. “We continue to experience record demand as more companies are empowered to integrate the planet and society into their business operations. We expect this investment to enable us to build on our traction to meet companies – including SMEs and private companies – at any stage of their sustainability journey, and collaboratively drive improvement in practices and impact at scale.”
More than 95,000 businesses across 200 industry categories and 175 countries rely on EcoVadis to monitor and improve the sustainability performance of their own business and trading partners. Today, EcoVadis – a pioneer in the use of sustainability intelligence in procurement and global supply chains – is used across a growing number of use cases, including Scope 3 carbon emissions management, private equity, ESG-linked loans, supply chain finance, third-party risk and resilience and more.
“We invest in companies that have the potential to combat climate change at scale,” said Rhea Hamilton, Managing Director at BeyondNetZero. “We believe EcoVadis has all the critical elements to make global impact and a meaningful contribution to the net zero transition, including a high-quality business model, strong leadership, innovative technology and a bold vision for driving ESG-oriented transformations across supply chains and industries. We are excited to back EcoVadis as the company enters a new phase of growth and look forward to partnering with its management team as we aim to further accelerate the company’s global expansion and climate impact.”
EcoVadis continues to experience rapid growth across its global customer base and network. Over the past 12 months, EcoVadis’ revenue grew 50% and its global workforce reached 1300 employees, 15,000 companies engaged with EcoVadis’ new Carbon Action Module, and it achieved more than 500,000 companies screened using EcoVadis IQ.
In addition to its own growth, EcoVadis has become a partner of choice in bringing sustainability intelligence into all key business decision points across its ecosystem of enterprise, procurement, financial and risk management platforms. Building on EcoVadis’ existing partnerships with Microsoft, SAP, Celonis, Coupa, Taulia and 40 others, this investment positions the company to scale impact and positively influence decision-makers around the world.
“We have tracked EcoVadis for many years and have been impressed with its strong leadership position and track record of fast global growth”, said Benoit Ficheur, Partner at Astorg. “Further, Astorg has been the first private equity client of EcoVadis, using its services to assess and measure our portfolio companies’ ESG performance and to raise sustainability-linked financing. This partnership has had a transformative impact across our portfolio, contributing to making Astorg one of the leaders in ESG and sustainability across the private equity world. Going forward we see very meaningful opportunities to support the company in its ambition to become the standard for private equity and finance”.
Previous funding rounds have included investments from CVC Growth Partners II (“CVC GrowthPartners”) in January 2020 and Partech in 2016, as well as a participation from Bain & Company in February 2020. CVC Growth Partners, the growth-oriented middle-market technology investment arm of CVC Capital Partners, remains the largest institutional shareholder in the business.
EcoVadis plans to leverage the funds to accelerate its global scale-up, deepen its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, make strategic acquisitions and fulfill its vision as a purpose-led company.
