Company: Vaayu
Website: https://www.vaayu.tech/
Business: Vaayu is the world’s first automated carbon software built to empower retailers to calculate and cut their carbon emissions in real time.
About Namrata and Vaayu
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Outside fossil fuel-generating businesses, retail is the biggest pollutant industry, responsible for approximately 25% of all global emissions. It is a problem that is impossible to ignore and Vaayu is here to help the retail industry play its part in the fight against climate change with the urgent action that the crisis requires.
Vaayu is the world’s first automated carbon software built to empower retailers to calculate and cut their carbon emissions in real time. Vaayu does this by leveraging proprietary AI and machine learning technology to draw insights from production, sales and logistics to provide unparalleled insights into entire supply chains, empowering retailers to lower emissions.
Namrata Sandhu studied Environment and Sustainable Development at University College London and later completed Harvard University’s Sustainability Executive Leadership Program, before roles at Arcadia and as Head of Sustainability at leading global retailer, Zalando. This experience gave Namrata invaluable insight into the specific challenges the retail sector has to grapple with while noticing a critical gap in the market for an automated carbon-tracking tool that provides retailers with the accurate data needed to reduce carbon at scale. In December 2020, Namrata co-founded Vaayu to deliver on this mission.
By integrating with point-of-sale and product life cycle management systems to automatically calculate the carbon footprint of daily transactions, Vaayu provides retailers with incredibly granular data on their operations, where their carbon emissions are the worst and most importantly, where they should focus their efforts.
Since 2020, Namrata has successfully led a total of $13m seed round funding and grown the team from 1 to 40. And the demand for Vaayu’s proposition is clear, having on-boarded more than 50 global brands since its inception including Ace & Tate, Missoma, Vinted and Wunderman Thompson Commerce.
From partnering with Ace & Tate to analyze the potential global warming impact of their frames, to providing Vinted with an accurate analysis of the emissions-saving potential of its C2C resale marketplace and powering the Sustainable Commerce Practice for Wunderman Thompson Commerce to drive conscious consumption across digital commerce channels – Vaayu is on track to help retailers avoid one gigaton of carbon by 2030, the equivalent of the combined emissions produced by Germany and France annually.
What Did The Judges Like About Vaayu?
Sithara said, “It’s so impressive how Vaayu is being used to improve the carbon footprint of household brands like Klarna, Stripe, and Vinted.”
Alix thought that Vaayu is “a stand-out business. I love seeing AI used towards an imperative social mission – business and planet sustainability! Vaayu’s proposition is so clear, the brand is super striking, and their results so far demonstrate how much further they can go. Excited to see how many businesses they can help create change for the better.”
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