The founding conversation arrived in the lazy middle of a family holiday. In 2019, somewhere between lunch and dinner on Spain's Costa Brava, Alexis Normand and his brother-in-law Arnaud Delubac began talking about an app that could track a person's carbon emissions. The setting was picturesque. The idea was accounting.
Normand had recently left Withings, where he had spent years building a connected-device business around information that many people could not see until a sensor captured it. Delubac was preparing to study entrepreneurship. They brought in Matthieu Vegreville, a data scientist who had also worked at Withings, and founded what became Greenly. The first version linked to a user's bank account, analyzed purchases, estimated their carbon impact, and rewarded lower-emission choices. It behaved less like a scold and more like a coach.
Then the founders encountered a fact that changed the company: organizations carry far larger emissions than individuals. Their data is also messier. A company's footprint is scattered across electricity bills, cloud usage, freight records, purchased materials, employee travel, and suppliers that may have little information of their own. The opportunity was no longer to tell one person what a grocery bill implied. It was to build a carbon ledger for an entire business.
“Companies emit a lot more than individuals.”Alexis Normand on Greenly's change of focus
01 · The recurring patternFirst make the invisible visible
Normand's route to climate software was unusually broad, but it was not random. He studied management at HEC Paris, public affairs at Sciences Po, and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He worked in strategy and public-policy consulting on projects in the Gulf and Egypt, then moved into strategic reviews and risk audits at Saint-Gobain. One job dealt in public systems. The next dealt in corporate systems. Both required him to find the structure hiding inside a large institution.
At Withings, beginning in 2013, the problem became more tangible. He built B2B initiatives around connected products, later led the company's Boston activities, and continued that work when Nokia acquired Withings. His next startup, Embleema, dealt with sensitive personal data and took him through Techstars. By the time he returned to France, he had seen several versions of the same product challenge: raw information has little power until someone can collect it, interpret it, and fit it into a decision.
Carbon accounting offered that challenge at industrial scale. Greenhouse gases are physical. Corporate emissions data often arrives as a proxy: euros spent, kilowatt-hours consumed, kilometers traveled, kilograms shipped. The software must translate business activity into carbon dioxide equivalent, preserve the assumptions, and leave an audit trail. The number at the end matters. The path to the number matters just as much.
02 · The product briefCarbon has three rooms, and the third has no walls
A corporate footprint is conventionally split into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources a company controls. Scope 2 covers purchased energy. Scope 3 stretches through the rest of the value chain, from suppliers and business travel to product use and disposal. That final category is where a clean diagram collides with organizational life. Procurement owns one file. Finance owns another. A logistics partner knows the route. A supplier knows the material. Nobody begins with the whole picture.
The expanding carbon ledger
Greenly's early wedge was automation. Connect accounting and operational systems, categorize activity, match it to emissions factors, and give a business a first inventory without months of spreadsheet archaeology. In 2024, Normand said that 70 percent of customers were first-time carbon accountants. That figure explains the design pressure. The platform has to be approachable enough for a newcomer, precise enough for a specialist, and transparent enough for someone who will eventually examine the work.
The danger in making a difficult process simple is that the simplicity can become a black box. Greenly's answer has been to pair software with climate specialists and to expand the product around the moments after calculation: reporting, target-setting, reduction plans, supplier engagement, and product-level life cycle assessment. The progression tells its own story. A footprint report is useful once. A system that keeps receiving data can influence purchasing, design, and operations repeatedly.
03 · The financing testA climate company still lives by SaaS math
Greenly raised a $23 million Series A in 2022 and a $52 million Series B in March 2024. The latter round was led by Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, with participation from investors including Energy Impact Partners, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HSBC, Move Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, and XAnge. At the time, Greenly reported more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue for the previous year and roughly 2,000 customers across Europe and the United States.
Normand was plain about how investors judged the business. They asked for the usual evidence: recurring revenue, retention, engagement, and the persistence of customer need. Climate purpose did not excuse weak software economics. That stance is more revealing than a green mission statement. It makes durability part of the climate thesis. A platform that customers abandon after filing one report will not become the operating layer its founders imagine.
“Nobody asked us different metrics than they would have expected from another SaaS company.”Normand on raising Greenly's Series B
The 2024 capital gave Greenly room to move deeper into specific industries and build product-level life cycle assessment. That matters in manufacturing, garments, and construction, where buyers increasingly ask for the footprint of a component, a fabric, or a building material rather than a single company-wide total. The unit of climate information is getting smaller. The data burden is getting larger.
The company has also pushed outward. It was selected for France's French Tech 120 program in 2024 and again in 2025. Greenly reported a B Corp recertification score of 103.5 in 2025. In 2026, Normand appeared at a Chicago sustainability summit to discuss AI and supply-chain decarbonization, then helped present Greenly's next product direction at its own Impact Summit: agentic AI aimed at moving Scope 3 work from measurement toward reduction.
04 · The biography underneathA reporter's eye inside an operator's career
There is another thread in Normand's biography that does not fit neatly into a software founder profile. In 2003, at about 21, he published Le Blues de la mygale, based on a month spent in Haiti teaching basic computing in a community. The book was framed as an effort to test distant assumptions against lived reality. Two years later, he interned at Le Figaro and handled its stock-market column for a month. He later published a book about the Gulf states and, in 2017, another about digital technology.
Those details give his current work a useful texture. A carbon inventory is full of abstractions: scopes, factors, estimates, baselines. Yet each abstraction is attached to a shipment, a factory, a server, a purchase, or a decision made by somebody. Normand's work has repeatedly sat between the model and the messy thing the model describes. Philosophy supplied questions. Consulting supplied frameworks. Journalism supplied an instinct to explain. Operating supplied deadlines.
He also presents climate work in the language of management rather than personal virtue. Greenly's public campaigns in London and New York in 2026 pushed carbon into the visual grammar of finance: indices, performance, risk, margin. The point was to reach the rooms where capital and operating decisions are already made. That approach may feel less romantic than saving the planet one shopping cart at a time. It is also closer to the leverage the founders discovered after their first app.
05 · What comes after countingThe total is only the opening line
The more demanding part of carbon management begins after the number appears. A company can publish a baseline and continue behaving as before. It can set a target without changing procurement. It can ask suppliers for data and receive silence. It can automate collection while preserving the same incentives that produced the emissions. Better measurement narrows the space for avoidance, but it does not make the decision.
Normand's aspiration for Greenly has expanded accordingly. The platform now reaches beyond compliance toward life cycle analysis, supplier coordination, reduction planning, and the economic case for resilience. In 2025, he said the company had supported nearly 3,000 organizations, engaged more than 10,000 suppliers, and trained more than 50,000 employees. Greenly's current site cites more than 3,500 clients. The numbers show distribution. The deeper test is whether that distribution changes what companies buy and build.
The Costa Brava idea survives inside this larger system. It still begins with an everyday record and asks what carbon story is hidden inside it. Only the subject has changed. A single card transaction became a corporate data trail. A prompt became a workflow. A personal estimate became a ledger shared across finance, operations, procurement, and the supply chain.
Normand's bet is that carbon eventually becomes ordinary management information, available when a choice is made rather than assembled after the year ends. If Greenly succeeds, the climate dashboard will matter less as a destination. It will sit quietly underneath decisions, translating activity into consequence while there is still time to choose differently.