Sandeep Chand and the surprising importance of a utility bill

A utility bill is an unlikely object around which to build a career. It arrives, demands money and generally hopes to be forgotten. For Sandeep Chand, co-founder and CEO of Tracera, it belongs near the beginning of a much larger conversation: what a company knows about its operations, and whether anyone can check the answer.

Chand became chief executive in September 2026 after leading the company’s product and engineering as CTO. The change put the person responsible for its underlying technology in charge of the business. His public description of the job was disarmingly practical: “Make proof effortless for our customers.” There are grander ways to announce a promotion. Few tell a customer quite so directly what the new boss intends to do on Monday.

The proposition fits the work that brought him here. Chand has spent his career building and leading software teams, including at Rocketrip, Caroo, WorkStride and iCIMS. At Tracera, that experience meets an awkward corporate problem. Environmental data may already exist somewhere inside a business, yet turning it into a number someone can defend takes a surprising amount of human pursuit.

A career spent behind the screen

His education paired a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology, now NSUT, with an MBA in strategy, marketing and finance from Carnegie Mellon University. The combination offers a useful way to read his subsequent career: technical systems on one side, the decisions and incentives surrounding them on the other.

By 2018, when Rocketrip appointed him chief technology officer, he was arriving from WorkStride, where he had been vice president of engineering. Rocketrip’s business connected employee rewards with savings on business travel. Chand’s remit covered a 22-person team and the less visible machinery of a software company: architecture, testing automation, engineering and development operations.

Those responsibilities matter because the pleasant surface of an application rests on decidedly unglamorous work. A reward must be calculated correctly. A service must keep running. A change must survive testing before customers meet it. The user sees the result; the engineering leader has to care about the path that produced it.

Chand later served as CTO at Caroo. His earlier engineering leadership also included iCIMS. Across these roles, the continuity is enterprise software: products built for organizations, with the organizational complications that come attached. Tracera gave that experience a different subject matter while retaining the familiar demand that the system work for people with actual jobs to finish.

The attraction was in the foundations

Tracera began in Bain & Company’s incubation program in 2022 and launched commercially under the name ESG Flo in 2023. Patrick Obeid, Chand’s fellow co-founder and predecessor as CEO, brought experience of the sustainability reporting problem. Chand brought the engineering perspective that would shape how the platform handled the information underneath a report.

Writing about the company’s funding in April 2025, Chand said he had joined almost two years earlier. He described the appeal in two parts: the chance to work on sustainability data for manufacturing and real estate, and the chance to start with machine learning and AI built into the product’s foundations.

That second part is revealing. He was interested in how the system could be constructed from the beginning, before successive workarounds hardened into a company’s permanent architecture. He described a shared data layer running through the customer journey. In ordinary language, the ambition was to let information remain useful as it moved from collection toward decisions.

By January 2025, ESG Flo had become Tracera. The new name foregrounded traceability and transparency, a change Chand welcomed publicly. A rebrand can be an expensive exercise in selecting a nicer typeface. Here, the word itself pointed toward a product requirement: a figure should retain a connection to the evidence behind it.

The paperwork gets a second job

For Chand, the practical test is what a customer can do with the information once it has been collected. His public priorities keep returning to the work that follows: checking evidence, answering colleagues and deciding where to direct attention.

Consider the materials Tracera is built to handle: bills, meter records, invoices and supplier documents. They originate in different places, in different formats and sometimes different languages. Before anyone can make a useful comparison, someone has to collect them, check them and work out what they mean together.

For a manufacturer, the difficulty multiplies across operations. A polished report comes at the end of that process. Chand’s attention has been directed further upstream, toward the repeated work required to make the report possible. The platform gathers information, flags gaps and keeps reported values connected to their original documents.

This makes the humble bill do a second job. It records a transaction, then becomes evidence for an operational or environmental calculation. Preserving that relationship helps a reviewer understand the number. It also makes the next question easier: if usage changed, where should the business look first?

There is a particular kind of software ambition in making this routine. The prize is less time spent reconstructing a calculation when someone asks about it. A good evidence trail has the social grace of a well-organized coat check: the correct thing comes back without an argument about whose it was.

There is a human consequence to that design choice. A sustainability professional who can retrieve the evidence has more room to discuss what a figure means. The colleague asking for it gets an answer they can examine. Chand’s proposed workflow gives both people a better starting point for their conversation, while keeping the original document close enough to settle the inevitable follow-up question.

Taking the company into the same conversation

In April 2025, Tracera announced a $12 million Series A led by Foundry, with Rho Ignition, Tola Capital and Contour Venture Partners participating. The round brought its announced funding since launch to $17.25 million. It also brought Foundry partner Seth Levine onto the board.

For Chand, then CTO, the announcement offered a chance to explain what had excited him about the work. His account emphasized the engineering foundation and the team building it. He wanted customers to use the resulting information to measure and reduce their impact, and to bring it into business decisions beyond the immediate reporting exercise.

When he succeeded Obeid in September 2026, that product argument became an argument for the whole company. His stated priorities included reducing the time teams spent checking information, automating follow-up on missing data and helping a board see whether the business was progressing toward its goals.

The move is interesting precisely because it contains so much continuity. An engineering leader knows what it takes to deliver a feature. As CEO, Chand now has to organize a business around delivering the result customers bought the feature to obtain. Reliability becomes a commercial promise as well as a technical responsibility.

“I’ve spent my career as an engineer”

Sandeep Chand, in his October 2026 essay on sustainability and revenue

When the customer asks for the numbers

By October, Chand was writing about another audience for sustainability data: the people deciding whether to buy from a manufacturer. His essay considered what happens when sustainability teams are asked to explain their contribution to sales. He treated the question as an invitation to participate in the commercial work of the business.

His argument followed the information through a customer relationship. A prospective buyer asks for environmental figures during a bid. A customer needs supplier information for its own reporting. A renewal becomes an occasion to demonstrate progress. The same information can serve these conversations if it remains current, understandable and supported by evidence.

That is a useful expansion of the CTO’s original problem. A system that can explain a figure to an auditor may also help a salesperson answer a buyer. Chand’s argument connects the people collecting the information with colleagues whose work depends on being able to use it promptly.

It also keeps the aspiration concrete. The desired outcome is a team that can answer the next question without launching another expedition through attachments and spreadsheets. The documents have already done the travelling. Ideally, the employees can stay at their desks.

A number worth following home

On October 23, 2026, Tracera announced that it had won the AI for Sustainability Excellence category at the Reuters Events Global Sustainability Awards. The company described software that reads operational documents, checks the information and helps customers identify places to cut costs and emissions. Chand credited the team and the customers using it.

One company-reported example involved a manufacturer using diesel to clean floors. Detecting the practice and changing it saved more than $50,000 annually. The story is an apt illustration of the direction Chand advocates: information collected for sustainability work can reveal something an operator has reason to act on.

The distinction between a reported result and a working decision runs through his public account of Tracera. His career has carried him through the systems behind employee rewards, business travel and enterprise applications. Now he is asking what happens when the paperwork of industrial life becomes easier to examine.

Chand’s ambition is to make the evidence readily available, then let people do something useful with it. The utility bill survives this transformation with its dignity intact. It still demands payment. It simply has a few more questions to answer.