Carbonfact acquires Vaayu Tech to expand fashion carbon reporting

Carbonfact has bought Vaayu Tech, stitching together two of fashion’s most data-hungry sustainability platforms just as product-level environmental reporting turns into a compliance race. The deal, completed on May 28, gives the apparel and footwear sector a larger reporting infrastructure at the very moment brands are being pushed to prove, not just promise, what sits behind every fiber, finish and factory footprint.

Vaayu was founded in Berlin in 2020 by Namrata Sandhu. Carbonfact, founded in Paris in 2021, said its platform was already used by more than 200 apparel and footwear brands including On, Ganni, The North Face, Burton and Marc O’Polo. Vaayu had worked with more than 100 brands, among them New Balance, Axel Arigato, Ace & Tate and Asket. Together, Carbonfact said, the combined customer base now tops 300 brands.

What changes now is not simply scale, but the machinery behind the numbers. Carbonfact said the merged platform holds more than 150,000 fashion-specific emission factors, 200-plus textile-specific processes, 650-plus material categories across 144 countries, and energy data from more than 7,000 textile factories. It also says it runs more than 2 million product textile and footwear life cycle assessments every day on behalf of customers. For brands trying to document a sneaker, a knit or a coat down to product level, that is the difference between a broad sustainability dashboard and an industrial-grade reporting engine.

The timing is hard to miss. Carbonfact has said the next two years will be shaped by the Digital Product Passport, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, French Eco-Score, CSRD, California SB 253 and the Empowering Consumers Directive. The European Commission adopted new ESPR measures on February 9 to stop the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear, while California’s SB 253 will require companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue that do business in California to disclose Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions annually. Carbonfact also says it already supports publishing LCA-based Digital Product Passports and covers more than 30 textile regulations.

The acquisition makes the sustainability software market look less like an ESG service and more like a compliance-tech arms race. A bigger dataset can make product reporting more usable, more automated and easier to audit. It can also deepen the moat around the companies that control the infrastructure, pushing fashion brands toward a small number of vendors that can translate raw material and factory data into regulator-ready disclosure.

The financing backdrop underlines that shift. Vaayu raised $11.5 million in seed funding led by Atomico in April 2022, while Carbonfact raised $15 million in fresh funding in 2024. Now the two are folded into one platform, and the message to fashion is blunt: the era of optional carbon storytelling is giving way to the business of proving every number.