EcoVadis, a provider of global business sustainability ratings, has raised $500 million with plans to accelerate its vision of influencing every business decision with sustainability intelligence.
The global investment round brings EcoVadis’ total capital raised to over $725 million and was led by Astorg and BeyondNetZero, General Atlantic’s climate investing venture, with participation from Singapore-based GIC and Princeville Capital’s Climate Technology Fund.
“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. EcoVadis, known for 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, and third-party risk and resilience.
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“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, the company said its revenue grew 50 percent and its global workforce reached 1,300 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.”
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. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the month following regulatory approvals.