00:00And welcome ladies and gents to VivaTech News.
00:04It's 2 p.m. here in Paris.
00:05It's probably breaking tech time somewhere.
00:10I'm Marjoli Payon and I'm bringing you
00:11your daily news of innovation here,
00:14live from VivaTech.
00:17Coming up, shaping the future of computer vision
00:20for autonomous driving.
00:22Well, we'll sit with SafeAD's CEO.
00:26And tech solutions for a better future.
00:27Let's review innovations that impact the world.
00:30To do so, of course, Meryt Dandas joins us
00:33for our segment, Tech for Change.
00:35Well, actually Meryt, you're not alone.
00:38Nope, you definitely brought a guest.
00:40And this is going to be a very informative
00:42type of talk and interview because, I mean,
00:47your guest's innovative platform helps companies
00:50to track their emissions.
00:52Absolutely, Marjoli.
00:54We spent a lot of time over the last few days
00:56talking about climate tech to mitigate or reduce emissions.
00:59But the obvious next step is how do we measure and track
01:02and potentially reduce those emissions in a business sense?
01:05It's obviously super important because businesses
01:07have an interest in, one, reporting their carbon footprint.
01:10And increasingly, they are required to do so.
01:13Hence, step in Greenly, which is an all-in-one platform
01:17to help measure, manage and reduce emissions.
01:19Alexei Noman is the co-founder and CEO of Greenly,
01:24which has been selected as one of the laureates of the French Tech 2030
01:27unveiled by President Emmanuel Macron during VivaTech.
01:30So, welcome and congratulations to you, Alexei.
01:33Thank you. Glad to be here.
01:35Now, before we start, I want to go back a little bit.
01:37Before Greenly existed and other companies like yours,
01:41how have companies been typically measuring their emissions?
01:44Yeah, so, you know, very large emitters had to measure their emissions already.
01:51So, they typically use consultants who came in and did a very good job,
01:55but with a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of going back and forth into offices.
02:01Our bet is that, you know, everyone is going to have to do this.
02:05So, not just the large enterprise, but actually their supply chain, the mid-market, the SMBs.
02:11So, you need to invent software for this that makes the beginning of the climate journey super simple.
02:17And that's what we work on.
02:18So, basically, you go in and help companies identify the source of their emissions
02:23and then provide them with a kind of dashboard on where they stand?
02:27Yeah, exactly.
02:28So, most of our companies are first-time sustainability managers, you know, that are working with us.
02:34And they sometimes start with the basics, what is my scope one, scope two, scope three, my direct emissions,
02:41those linked to my energy consumption, those linked to my purchasing and so on.
02:46And so, they need something simple to start with this topic, which is, okay, I need to quantify everything that
02:53my company does.
02:54I need to convert that into carbon, but the pain in this process is collecting the data.
02:59And where we build tech is by essentially creating integration so that you pull this information from your accounting,
03:07you pull this from your electricity utility software, your cloud if you're a tech company, et cetera, et cetera.
03:14Now, in general, are companies doing as good as they hoped or a lot worse than they imagined?
03:20So, most companies have no idea when they start and they're kind of afraid to share where they're at.
03:28So, I would say the first thing is it's important to disclose your emissions.
03:34There's no shame.
03:35The world at large is emitting too much.
03:37So, if we start hiding things, it's worth them saying, well, I'm really bad.
03:41But, you know, in fact, I'm transparent about this and I have a roadmap for reducing.
03:45But still, you know, a ton of CO2 is very abstract for most people.
03:49So, there are two things you can do to make it more palatable.
03:53One is provide benchmarks.
03:55And since we have about 1,500 customers today, we can be very granular in providing benchmarks,
04:03not just overall by sector, but by type of emissions.
04:06Are you more intensive in terms of cloud consumption?
04:09Are you more intensive in terms of business travel, in terms of electricity spend and so on and so forth?
04:15What's really interesting, Marjorie, is that Greenlee also, as well as tracking the emissions,
04:19advises the companies on how they can then go about reducing it.
04:22Like you said, there's nothing to be ashamed of.
04:23What there is to be ashamed of is not trying to reduce them.
04:26And you help them with that.
04:27Yes, exactly.
04:28So, you know, the Paris Agreements for Climate Change have set a trajectory
04:32where we need to half our emissions by 2030.
04:35And then it's essentially a 5% to 8% reduction per year.
04:39So you need to, first and foremost, identify the big buckets, also the low-hanging fruit.
04:45And this is very different from sector to sector.
04:48But since we're at VivaTech today, you know, working with hundreds of tech companies,
04:53we've seen that half of their emissions are indirect.
04:56They're linked to their consumption of digital services and mainly their cloud.
05:01They're cloud.
05:01So, why is a cloud emitting?
05:03Well, these are machines that are consuming a lot of electricity, generating a lot of heat,
05:08so you need to cool them.
05:09And they're plugged to the grid where your data sits.
05:13So, an example of that is for us to, well, monitor for each instance of your AWS, Azure,
05:22or Google Cloud, how much electricity it has consumed.
05:25So, we have built models dependent on the machine, lifecycle analysis.
05:30We convert each instance, each vCPU, on a minute-level electricity.
05:34And you can then tell, well, why don't you change your mix of vCPUs?
05:38You don't need the big engine for your small computation, you know?
05:43You can parallelize computing.
05:45You can get a 30% reduction of your electricity.
05:49And then, second thing is electricity converts into carbon because it's plugged to a grid.
05:56And that grid may have a lot of coal, a lot of gas, or maybe some wind.
06:00And most tech companies have their data in Ireland, at least in Europe.
06:04And in fact, it's not the greatest energy mix in Europe, unfortunately.
06:07So, if you move your data to Norway, or to Switzerland, or to Austria, or to France,
06:13well, you're just improving your cloud consumption by, like, tenfold.
06:19So, just move your data, basically.
06:21So, the level of detail in the data you have helps you make intelligent recommendations.
06:26Just a last question.
06:28I've read you want to make carbon accounting as universal as financial accounting.
06:33What's the biggest challenge to reach that?
06:35Yeah, so, today we're at capacity to do about between three and five thousand carbon accounting
06:42reports per year.
06:43But our ambition is to get to a million within five years.
06:47So, part is the market is pushing SMBs to do this.
06:50But we also need to build more user-friendly UX, create more channels.
06:56So, it's very much an execution play for us with a product that's super easy to us.
07:01I would say it's, you know, low entry floor.
07:05It's easy to get in, but very high ceiling.
07:07The more ambitious you are, the more granular, the more detail you need to get.
07:12So, it's product, and then just scaling the company, and raising maybe a lot of money, too.
07:17Well, Alexi Marad, I guess that change needs to be measurable.
07:21Thank you so much for bringing together a solution here on Breaking Tech.
07:25How about we see what Catherine Nicholson is up to, Marad?
07:28Let's see where she is. I'm sure she's somewhere interesting.
07:30Absolutely. I'm looking forward to see it.
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