Company: Vaayu
Website: https://www.vaayu.tech/
About Namrata & Vaayu
A citizen of the world, Namrata Sandhu is the CEO and founder of Vaayu. She moved from her home in India, going on to work and study across the UK, US and Spain. Namrata studied Environment and Sustainable Development at University College London and later completed Harvard University’s Sustainability Executive Leadership Program. This paved the way for her to secure an in-house sustainability position at Arcadia Group before eventually becoming head of sustainability at leading global retailer, Zalando.
This extensive experience gave Namrata an invaluable insight into the specific challenges the retail sector has to grapple with and why existing solutions to help them become more sustainable and environmentally-friendly are a stopgap at best.
Seeing retail’s pollution challenges up close – the retail space emits more carbon than maritime shipping and international flights combined – alongside environmental and human rights issues, Namrata founded Vaayu. It’s the world’s first automated carbon software platform for retailers to measure, monitor and reduce their carbon footprint across the supply chain in real-time and at scale.
Vaayu’s software platform automatically pulls and analyses data to help retailers reduce their carbon footprint at scale. It does so by integrating with eight of the nine largest e-commerce software providers including Shopify, which cover 75% of the online e-commerce software market. Drawing on the data of sales, logistics and product, retailers can measure and lower their carbon emissions in real-time.
Since launching at the height of the pandemic, the business has already onboarded over 50 global brands including Astrid & Miyu, Missoma and Wunderman Thompson which looks after Unilever, Sainsbury’s and more. This rapid growth is a testament to Namrata’s retail expertise and leadership abilities, which also led to an impressive $1.6m pre-seed investment raise in July 2021, having only launched at the start of that year.
Namrata is a strong believer in continual innovation, the latest of which has led to the introduction of product footprinting. This provides consumers with unprecedented insight on the environmental footprint of individual products so they can make conscious choices and play their role in helping to meet the UN’s climate goals.
