Its co-founder and CMO, Arnaud Delubac, 28, was the guest of 21st by CentraleSupélec and ESSEC Ventures, for an exclusive conversation with entrepreneurs from their programs, at STATION F this Tuesday, April 2.
📺📺The replay of his talk is available here!
He tells us more about the company's evolution and its current ambitions.
You are the co-founder and CMO of Greenly. What has been your journey?
I studied marketing and communication at INSEEC before joining the Centrale-ESSEC Entrepreneurs Specialized Master. It was during these studies that I co-founded my first startup, Planshot, a social network designed to share real-time outing plans with an extended network.
Its main interface was an interactive map allowing users to create or join activities proposed by their network, with a defined timeframe. The app aimed to diversify social interactions beyond the usual circle of contacts, fostering authentic connections.
It offered two sharing modes: "OpenSpace" for public announcements and "Room" for private invitations. This application was particularly popular on university campuses, with over 15k users at the time.
I also explored the digital space in various fields, working in agencies, startups, and even in politics alongside Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Secretaries of State Mounir Mahjoubi and Cedric O. These experiences led me to try my hand at a second startup, Greenly, with Alexis Normand, our CEO, and Matthieu Vegreville, our CTO.
For those unfamiliar with Greenly, what is your value proposition?
Previously, we targeted individuals through a mobile application. This application, offering secure synchronization with users' bank accounts, allowed them to track the carbon footprint of various daily activities, such as transportation, shopping trips, restaurant meals, or plane and train travel. Everything could be measured automatically, and users could then add more detail to their spending to get the most precise measurement possible. The application quickly attracted 50,000 users.
But today, and this is our main focus, Greenly provides companies of all sizes with solutions for accounting for their CO2 emissions, enabling them to establish compliant Carbon Footprint Assessments. Our clients operate in various sectors: technology and finance, as well as retail and industry.
Our value proposition is to combine climate experts with our platform to offer a precise, simple, and intuitive solution. We currently have over 1800 clients worldwide, and our ambition is to reach 10,000 soon. The merger of financial accounting and carbon accounting is happening before our eyes, and we are proud to contribute to this revolution.
Your go-to-market strategy has been particularly effective. Could you tell us a bit about it?
Our key strategy has been to become an expert in each vertical, deeply immersing ourselves in the specific realities of each targeted sector, including technology, finance, industry, and retail. We understood the importance of customizing our approach for each sector.
In technology, for example, we focused on managing the digital carbon footprint, while in finance, we helped institutions manage climate risks.
For industry, our offering was adapted to meet specific requirements for emission reduction and process optimization. A crucial aspect of our strategy was to train our teams in the specificities of each sector. This allowed us to provide expert advice tailored to our clients, by better understanding their unique challenges and needs.
And was this segmentation also applied in your marketing strategy?
Yes, in addition to this vertical approach, we adopted flexible pricing based on company size and sector, and targeted marketing campaigns to highlight specific benefits (cost reduction, brand image, employer brand, certifications, obligations related to current regulations…). We also track precise performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of our strategy.
A key element has been the integration of a combined inbound and outbound marketing strategy to generate incoming leads. For inbound marketing, we focused on creating quality content related to our product and environmental issues.
We produced articles, videos, and e-books not only to improve our SEO, but also to strengthen our reputation in the field of sustainability and create a visible brand. This content marketing approach allowed us to attract qualified traffic to our website and engage our prospects organically. We were aware that the benefits of inbound marketing would be long-term.
In parallel, we also implemented outbound marketing tactics, including direct outreach via cold emails, targeted advertising campaigns, and active participation in trade shows. This allowed us to actively reach prospects who were not yet engaged with our brand.
And how did you reconcile your product development with your commercial strategy?
My co-founder and CEO has always prioritized listening to our clients' needs, rather than focusing solely on technical aspects that might appeal to us. It's also crucial that as founders, we remain actively engaged in the field. We firmly believe that maintaining direct contact with the market and deeply understanding the needs of the companies that approach us is essential for steering Greenly in the right direction, by building the most appropriate roadmap possible.
We pivoted towards the enterprise market right after our initial funding rounds. This allowed us to invest in sales, development, and marketing teams, as well as our product teams and climate experts.
Let's talk about your Series A funding round in 2022. What was the amount, and what were your objectives at that time?
We completed an initial funding round of €500K, followed by a second round of €2.5M in the first half of 2022. These funds were essential for transforming our business model initially. We also had to recruit massively, growing from 40 to 180 people, all while maintaining the same objective: staying connected to our core values: feedback, ambition, excellence, and impact. All of this allowed us to grow our customer base to over 1,700 clients in more than 10 countries. It also enabled us to launch our international expansion and aim for a leadership position in our sector.
You've just announced a very successful Series B funding round of 49 million euros. What are the next steps for Greenly?
With this funding, we aim to establish ourselves as the catalyst for corporate environmental transition. This funding round strengthens Greenly's role as an accelerator of change for businesses, at a time when tracking and reducing emissions are becoming business imperatives for all companies, regardless of their size.
This new funding round confirms our leadership position in a booming market, driven by new regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in the EU and the recent requirement for listed US companies to report their GHG emissions annually.
Greenly will thus continue its international expansion and further enhance its suite of climate solutions designed to help companies internalize climate expertise to deploy a true emissions reduction strategy.
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